Adrian Guță

Painting, a Romanian version of combining paintings, assemblage, object at the meeting point between sculpture and installation. These are the elements of his working front, a field of studies characterized by a certain dynamic, of a productive overtaking of the artistic language’s boundaries. A series of his crystallized creations, from the last five years, are gathered in the Cultural Centre “Brâncoveanu Palaces” exposition, in Mogosoaia.

His formation was made at the National Academy of Arts from Bucharest, in the 90’s, later on becoming himself a professor at the same Academy, in the Painting department. Ever since, he has been promoting an open and stimulating pedagogy for his students. He is also a founding member of the Salmastru group (2002).

There are different stages of accumulation in his own studio, of an intense work on multiple canvases, followed by a brief reflection break, temporarily detachment, then another “strike”.

The dreaming is mingled with a lucid muster. Hazard has its own assumed role in his work’s genesis. Nonetheless, his will to control the whole assemblage starts its own offensive. Also, there are episodes of rebellion against any given conventions, the temptation of accessing a ‘’delete’’ button about anything that means “learned/known” in art, and the impulse of returning to a certain pureness of the childhood drawings…Perhaps the struggles of shape and colour in the symbolism’s field, between lyrical abstractivism and a specific figurative primitiveness. He often finds poor suggestions, or maybe his wish of searching various shades of white is the fault for it, but all these are also expressions of melancholy for that pureness of primarily artistic expression, untouched by the constraints of systematic study. The obsession for the colour white comes from his Mediteranean trips in Greece. These and the following bucket of memories, meditation and cultural and contextual reference are included in the genesis of the assemblage series (2007), which makes a subtle reference to objects that become captive of a gypsum mass.

Most of them are objects from his nearness, his working studio, that are glued together as an exercise of speediness, taking risks, but perhaps beneath all of these, he developed an ability to recombine forms plastically. The cultural interception can also be tempted by the memory of some surrealistic echoes. These pieces represent, somehow, open “windows” only for “objectual archeology” of his personal myths.

His paintings change, often, in a few steps. Ion Anghel operates changes because of the stressed and intimate dynamic of his creating art. A piece of work is finished only when it leaves his studio. Changes appeared until the last moment in the series entitled “Sagrada Familia”, with an warm smile on the face. The presence of some defining items for his “working suit” and not only, extended to the painted images, made us compare them to some combine painting of Rauschenberg.

Some of the paintings made for “Greatest Hits” from Hard Rock Cafe, in Bucharest 2009, are included in the Mogoșoaia’s exhibit. Those are mood paintings, insights of some of his favourite ’60-‘80’s rock music. Figurative or explicit signs are floating on spacious surfaces of abstract forms.

On the other hand, it is impossible for the artist to make a difference between what means figurative and abstract, of course, in the traditional way. Maybe we attend to fight, sometimes, between the real and its opposite. Other times, they may seem not only to coexist peacefully, but also to help each other develop. Recent works, which belong to a plastic investigation started in 2011, encourage these considerations. In the given context, the pleasure of working with coloured matter comes out in the shining light.

In the context, it can be distinguished the pleasure of working with coloured items, the dialogue between letters, reminding of Cy Twombly, and through him about graffiti, it is tempting to also compare him with Tapies.

Objects that are made in 2012, some big dimensions and constructive fibre, from the family of columns, unravel the artist’s interest for monumentalism, his closeness with sculpture. Over the same period of time, it appears as an interest for the relation between object-assemblage-installation (,,Boxes”): it marks a different kind of universe, of plastic and semantic signs, in which expressionistic accents attract the attention at a harsh meditation about the human nature. The author creates these objectual assemblages from materials that are close to Arte Povera, from wasted material and ready-mades.

Ion Anghel grows up, artistically, quick. He exceeded the stage of emergent artist and offers already matters of a different importance.