Although we can presume that, generally speaking, the strong point of an artwork is its construction, style or the way its narration succeeds to offer, via the contents, a certain refinement (or emotion) to some Ideas, by clarifying their subtle connection with the mere representations of our daily-shared experiences, I think it would be useful to reconsider this impression. I don’t pretend that concept՚s filiation of an oeuvre has no importance. I just suggest putting aside classifications and categories in order to be able to approach art՚s instantiations in the light of its intimate contacts with life. Because beyond any interesting chronicle of Ideas, the meaning of art is to unclose – once again and again, sometimes obsessively, at other times confusingly – the frail path of existence, the insignificant and volatile struggle of a soul mostly disillusioned by its impossibility to understand its own destiny. Art doesn’t aim to replace reality by its shade in the heat of mimicry, nor to detach from reality, by enveloping it in an abstraction veil, but become its living consciousness. According to this demarche impregnated by quests, critical hypotheses or by a certain incompleteness and recognition of the relative aspects of creation, art is brought in the sphere of the human, where it participates actively and unmediated. Art surprises, inspired by the germs of the unusual, of a hazard germinating mysteriously in human life. By nourishing with what it often contests or rejects out of ignorance or fear, art can see there where we are blinded, it can break the silence there where our voice turns speechless, it can penetrate commonplaces and rewrite their symbolism; it can participate in the revival of self-awareness, by explaining quite differently the route of the experienced facts. In the existential cycle, art reiterates and revalorizes what seems already-much-too-familiar or common. By re-signifying these names of human existence, a radical renewal of the way in which we can order the world and our self-representation is highlighted. Transcription of the daily meteorology into another key counterbalances our refusal to make our mind / heart stop and halt upon the existential fragments considered empty, unable to communicate something new. Therefore, the artistic effort reports mystery there where we (the others) see clichés; it gets seduced by the routine of small gestures able to readjust life next to the Other by contemplating them, while we (the others) ignore them, touched by the fervour of performance. By dislodging what society perceives qua norm (normality), art demonstrates that spiritualization is still possible.
Valuation of this thought resembles the process of polishing a “profound novel”, one of Radu Petrescu՚s desiderata. In this writer՚s vision, the polishing process has nothing to do with the intellectualism of an epic construction or with stating “fine thoughts”, but with the presence of some “deep, vivid” characters able to perceive “the complexity of life”. Therefore we need to revert to reality, to look into the mundane, whom the writer invites us, qua readers, to approach in some other way. At the end of that way we are neither soothed nor liberated, but rather aware of the energies we are festered and propelled by. In art, just like in a novel, the characters are evidences of the social ground we go on, the causal witnesses of the world we coexist in and to whom each of us inexorably lends a different interpretation, a different role. Under artist՚s signature, characters՚ features involve a renewal of the eyes՚ function: by looking at, we learn to redefine; by looking at, we do realize and get closer to the essence of things.
It՚s just what Bogdan Vlăduță aims at in his painting: a telluric, rough painting, ‘emaciated’ of details, where shapes evolve under the sign of a tension between organic and inorganic, between universal and particular; an existentialist, dense painting which, through the morphology of pictorial language and proper tonality, resonates with the visage of some old archive photos; an uncomfortable painting due to the displayed subjects which, for sure, have nothing in common with the spontaneity of the experiment, yet are stamped by the rigour of an uninterrupted work.
In artist՚s series of “Self-portraits” or in his cycles of “Coffins” and “Beds”, the intensity of the pictorial matter makes us ____________
1. Ernst Bloch, Traces, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2006, p. 124.
wonder, because we could (re)experience troubling stories through the images coming to life on the picture surface. Therefore, in order to read them, we require a certain state of mind. The ‘script’, which seems both familiar and strange, suggests that, beyond their mere semblance with reality, the plastic shapes become “more and more an inner appearance having to pass through the realm of the spirit”2. Perhaps this is why the painter chose to give up the dynamism of representation and the zest of colour in favour of staticity and dull hues. From the gesture derive ample timeless or inner inanimate urban landscapes whose atmosphere has something of the universe of photography. As the artist is acknowledged with photography, it՚s important to mention the role he attributes it: that of a punctum in the searched reality, able to guide his glance towards mundane՚s secret details. Qua visual and referent document of everything surrounding him, photography turns into the rudder of his painting, a starting point in the composition construction, establishing indirectly, through his way of working, a filiation with two artists he feels close to: Ion Grigorescu and Horia Bernea. Photography, together with sketch and drawing have the role of a crutch, they even push the idea of painting. They ‘freeze’ the real, stealing the sequences otherwise ignored by the fugitive eye. And not only that. Photography has the dimension of a daily diary-like notation. In an interview, the artist confesses: “The double meaning of this gesture: you leave a trace of your passage through life and concomitantly record the noteworthy things.”
Bogdan Vlăduță blanks out reality through photography and drawing; after being collected, the fragments get in the artistic laboratory and are re-woven into another canvas. But the fibre of the nascent painting starves with a feeling of inner unfulfillment, of vulnerability. This feeling has a double significance: on the one hand, it suggests a personal reference to what could be interpreted as the theme-of-death; on the other hand, it subtly examines the certitude of the human condition, its ephemerality, which gets support via artist՚s concern for familiar objects. We experience this argument even where Vlăduță represents himself naked, standing up, with an alienated regard and a silhouette sketched like an ancient sculpture, challenging us to outrun life՚s superficies and become aware of our fragility, of the importance the dialogue with our own self has. Artist՚s painting is deprived of lyricism: it breathes a certain inner violence by virtue of its direct relationship with reality; resembling a descent into Hell, it destabilizes us, and we are required to understand why.
“When I paint, do I know that I՚ll die? is a text accompanying one of Vlăduță՚s early selfportraits. By questioning the dialectics between painting՚s and his own condition reveals the existence of a paradox the artist settled through an aesthetic behaviour based on a corpus of obsessively-resumed themes. While getting over them, we notice they describe purged landscapes, peopled by concept shapes (the coffin, the bed, the ancient statue, the block-of-flats) aiming to solve the intrinsic antagonism of the pictorial demarche. They participate in the artistic and social life – in other words, they bring in problems specific to both art and society. For that reason we understand why their common note is given by the inquetitudes of another question to whom the artist tries to answer: “Don’t these times bring us into the position of checking much more critically and responsibly the motivations we bestow at the foundation of the pictorial act?”
Certainly, Vlăduță՚s concern to maintain art in the realm of ethics justifies this permanent process meant to resume the various hypostases of different concept shapes displayed on the picture canvas. They claim the need to get art out of isolation and make it speak through the lens of those living nearby. Through painting, the artist highlights the antagonism of our contemporaneity – though it՚s possible that his repertoire of themes couldn’t point out directly this connection, and therefore mislead us. However, the images in his painting are neither alien to contemporary life, nor indifferent to the reasons that structure and dynamite the social sphere, its fears and prejudices. Though their conversation with the present is neither virulent nor nonchalant, the images set up a plunge into the human abyss. Artist՚s painting acquires a liberating, cathartic function which takes into account the affirmation of a content of truth: it reveals a type of reference to and rhetoric apprehension of life, while offering the beholder the possibility of his/her own reconciliation with the real, with its dark shades and misachievements. Here we have to do with a painting of traces, a painting with a high degree of universality, acutely conscious of the spiritual opacity animating our times. How to talk about existence if we don’t resort to its counterpart, that is to non-existence?
The painting of traces, i.e. of the concept shapes, rewrites without emphasis its relationships with the reality inspiring it. In its ______________
2. Theodor W. Adorno, Teoria estetică // Aesthetic Theory, Paralela 45 Publishing House, Pitești, 2006, p. 134.
space, some shapes become passage-pieces (like the bed, the coffin), objects of human intimacy and interiority, of suffering and of the biological. Occupying picture՚s foreground, these pieces are projected on an indecisive background which catches our eye. Yet our attention isn՚t so much captivated by the pieces themselves, as by the serialism of their representation. How could we figure it out? The passage-pieces could be condensed expressions of life rituals. They set in order our intimate space; they give meaning to a personal microcosm; they are the mere evidence of “regular and trivial things”, says the artist. And, at the same time, they adjust an alleged impossibility: “in art, transcendence and miracle are herewith, among us – surprisingly actual and palpable”, the painter himself states. Within this conceptual framework Vlăduță puts up, the painting is affirmative. His painting designates the subject, calls it up and tries to render it in shapes whose realism is stamped by enigmas and distress.
While looking at the taciturn and extinct landscapes from the cycle “Coffins” the artist started in 2003, in Rome, we are drawn by the monolithic presence of the empty coffins, by the ambiguity of their representation: they are uncovered, vacant, anonymous and standstill. Their half-aligned grouping and absence of the body induce a sentiment of tension. We are invited to regard and realize that the miracle has already happened. The coffin becomes a conventional framework conceptualizing the theme of Resurrection – a mysterious trace of the moment. We can see not only an iconographic scene crossing art history, but also artist՚s inner willingness to evoke insistently, through the shape of the empty coffin, the reasons which place him in the proximity of art philosophy. A clue of this reading is given by the chosen theme and the particular way the artist achieved the image: there is not a unique, but several coffins. Beholder՚s immediate intuition is shaken. The artist decides to humanize “the exceptional condition” of Resurrection by reflecting upon one of the present-day symptoms, the loss of man՚s relationship with the transcendent. Coffin՚s shape highlights the need of the secular society, wasted between entertainment and self-abandonment, to revive mystery. Let՚s not forget that in the nature of this human experience – the death – there is an immanent dialectics related to its ritualistic function aiming to maintain social relationships within (micro)communities, yet also in the affirmation of a universal-like aspiration requiring the return to life. Consequently, the multiplication of the concept shape of the empty coffin – placed in the featureless scenery qua neuter photographic background – becomes an attribute requiring the reinstatement of the spiritual as a part of life.
The duality absence–presence / what has been–what could be is still obvious in the cycle “Beds”. The subject of pictures՚ narration is the concept shape of a bed abandoned by the individual who rested or lay in it. As the human occupant differs according to the circumstances the bed was used for – hospital bed, cot, house bed, street bed, prison bed –, he/she who first contemplates it will try to discover the mystery: is it about an absence or about a disappearance? Each image could be interpreted qua singularized version of a (possible) story of the person next to us. In that case, the bed is similar to the portrait: the portrait of the individual who has been lying in it and whose trace was encrypted in the sheet folds, revealing something of his/her identity and personality through the way in which he/she slept or let the place unoccupied. In the context, the bed can be a symbol of the unexpected, of the fate. It is a dual sign, a sign of an anticipated death or of a miraculous healing. That՚s why Bogdan Vlăduță՚s Beds disturb us. They aren’t rooms for eroticism and seduction, but for suffering and inner disorder. Yet the void left by man՚s extinction or absence seems to acquire a different, deeper meaning too, a meaning related to artist՚s way to self-relate to the subject of his practice, which could be rendered in Rimbaud՚s words: je est un autre // “I is another”. According to this poetics, the world of those next to us stands for the immediate referent of Bogdan Vlăduță՚s painting. It tends to humanize the spiritual, to reaffirm the fundamental existential values in the context of an estrangement from the Other one. For the artist, painting resembles an archaeological process, a continuous excavation of the traces left by those next to him, a space full of moral content, in permanent contingence with life.
