THE REDISCOVERY OF LANGUAGE
In the first few years of the seventh decade, things had gradually begun to move in a normal direction in Romanian art. The propaganda-makers of the Fifties had pretty much spent their rhetorical momentum, the lots of tractors arriving from the USSR no longer constituting the major artistic objective, and those responsible for checking the easels and brushes of suspect artists had also become somewhat lazy. The eye, while not fully liberated from caution and timidity, was once again able to feast on the pure joy of colors and the legitimate geometry of drawing. But while the "pictorialism" of paintings had been reaffirmed and its alphabet was returned to circulation, a new problem issued from this: where was contemporary art heading, what was its intimate sense and how could its moral horizon be determined?
BREAK AND CONTINUITY
Appearing suddenly, the change of regime in Romania found art in a survival mode. But this survival was happening within a general climate of extreme hostility and a certain direct threat from the part of amateurism, powerfully sustained in the last few years and ably promoted politically. Some three major segments of professional art gelled in such conditions and these brought a certain equilibrium to the whole. The first was that of the institutionalised collaborators and court painters who, to a greater or lesser extent, included names such as Viorel Marginean, Sabin Balasa, Vasile Pop Negresteanu, Constantin Piliuta and many others without any authority, as well as many much more complex artists, such as Ion Bitzan and Ion Setran who, through an opportunism deserving much more studied analysis, accepted explicit negotiation with the regime. The second segment included those who succeeded in becoming accepted both at the level of party propaganda and at that of wide public opinion, without improvable compromises and evident concessions. The third segment is somehow made up of an alternative artistic attitude, not in terms of technique and materials, but in terms of moral position, iconography, esthetic and doctrinal aspirations (the latter rather more implicit). This category is represented by the group around Paul Gherasim, primarily, the Prolog Group, but also by a more ample movement of a spiritualistic nature, made up mostly of artists who started out in the seventh decade. There was also a vague fourth segment, with little chance of coherence because of official hostility: it was characterized by non-conventional expressions and attitudes. This individual artistic behavior had as its leading protagonists, among others, Geta Bratescu, Ion Bitzan, Ion Grigorescu, while several of its pioneers, such as Paul Neagu, or Stefan Bertalan, had already left the country several years before.
BETWEEN CONFUSION AND CRYSTALIZATION
Such an overview, albeit summary, which views the last years of the Communist regime, is very important, because along its structure manifested the major trends of the period following 1990. The middle segment, namely the official one, continued to manifest equal to itself, and to meet the expectations of the public, while the spiritualist segment initiated a battle for supremacy in relatively bizarre conditions. Immediately following the December cannonade, Romanian painting, from hallucinating amateurs to those persons with certain pretensions of sobriety, repeatedly discovered with suspect vehemence, Christian values and the great promises of religious art. Because the Romanian revolution took place over Christmas, like a revelation, and ended in a bloodbath, it was felt as a Messianic sign and a certain liberation for redemption. One could not enter a gallery without being assaulted by waves of blood nad bundles of thorns twisted into crowns, forest of crosses and tons of spikes. Even those who just days before had been painting the Ceausescus, in hierartic-martial attitudes, as Balasa did, woke up to toil on the climbs of Golgota and the Crucifixion. In these conditions, Sorin Dumitrescu decided to remove from this area all subcultural residues, along with opportunistic vulgarity and neverending, sterile gesticulations. On the basis of and as an extension to the Prolog Group, he founded the Anastasia Foundation, in whose program one finds explicitly the idea of reconciliation of culture and cultic space. It was in the Catacomba galleries where the most coherent project of the past ten years was promoted, where religious and spiritualistic art, in the broad sense, was freed of all its initial parasites. The neo-traditional segment of today's Romanian art was born and fortified around this gallery, which strangely reconciles a certain doctrinal conservativism with a real opening to technical experiment, non-conventional materials and diversity of languages. The second major trend that manifested during these years, is the so-called experimental one, that of alternative forms of thought and artistic expression. This segment became coherent after 1990. Things have remained pretty much the same. Between the neo-traditional and sincronistic poles, the balanced art continues to manifest itself, equal to itself. It is polymorphic, comfortable, beautiful, decorative and sure, offering serious assurances that we can enter without problems into the next millennium. Which, according to Malraux's misconstructed saying, will be one of globalization or none at all!
Daniela Chirion
Facets
Oil on Canvas
Oscar Han
The First Kiss
1926, bronze
Work by George Apostu
Florin Mitroi
Portrait
tempera on paper
