Oliv Mircea

He moves through the “doors” and “windows” of his interior landscapes.

We are living in a time quite hard to penetrate with just a fierce thought. The need for truth and justice, the equivocal existence of the artist, the extended anonymity of untouchable subjects, the obscurity and the upside-down world we live in, the uneasiness that tears apart all the rules- these are the world’s characteristics, in which you ask yourself: who is Ion Anghel? Who is the one that until recently claimed about his own art: “I feel that my art will find its peace the moment my seeker’s emotion will surpass mine.”

Getting closer to Ion Anghel’s works means to enter a cryptical dimension made and symbolized by him, which follows an hallucinating path that he manages to control. The analysis of space, imagined iconic by Ion Anghel, includes ontological and anthropologic branches that are quite hard to understand. Equal and bizarre, full of deep meanings and balanced in the same time, space is shown by signs or objects. Motions of any kind are reflected on the gestural level of the mind, level that is deeply printed in space. In means of space, the door (in which Gaston Bechelard used to see a deity of sill) becomes a effigy with the metaphoric and anaphoric role, beyond the fact that it combines 2 different spaces and mediates between in and out, between consciousness and unconsciousness, on a deeper and profound level. The framework of his pieces is crossed over by distances, marked by “afar feelings”, rather than “afar geometry”. The painter is not using techniques of measuring space, although he makes it more significant, due to his ability to define the object.

The door becomes a space of reflectivity which creates an anti-world strength. Under the spell of an unleashed fantasy that implies world’s crossbreeds and unexpected and shocking alliances, dominated by fear and keen, pure fascination marked by irony and a strange denunciation that may be symbolic, esoteric and sometimes, alchemic. The painter plays deliberately with the symbols, warning the viewer about the nightmares that are about to come. Ion Anghel’s fantastic world represents the ideal illustration of the definition given by Roger Caillois: “Everyone carries a door, a room in himself”. The one that carries in his existence the space, with its ontological and anthropologic branches and its various versions of memory-space, fear-space, and it is marked by artistic object, delivering the painter’s light of truth to the viewer. Discrete and impersonal, the artist composes space by begging a God that he may seem to hear. In the piece, the artist is searching with cleverness and talent his balance, the Self. Ion Anghel lives in his own world. When you follow, even in a dream, the iconic world of the painter, the world of symbols opens and the air rarefies in a way that wants to receive you as its new member.

The edge of clearness speaks to viewers that are capable to endure and comprehend the Truth of life as something else. What did they see, the ones that dared? A different kind of world, with different rules and different meanings? A world that, outside the door, is completely different. There, in that different world, you aren’t alone. Above all these doorsills that are calling you, it is floating a ingenuous: “Why?”

I read Ion Anghel’s works in its minimalistic language. “The Doors”, ‘’The Books”, “The Windows” – because books are the windows of the world- are minimal artworks. The painter is tracking a scale of intensities, and he finds himself neutral against the old way of signifying. The work unravels from any extra-visual meaning. Everything stays in the simple evidence of a forceful world. Form and shape become neutral and minimal. They forbid anecdotes and emotional anarchy, although they do keep the strength of realistic and symbolic communication. The strength of this works consists in the abandonment of any exaggeration of expressionism, of action-painting and especially the uncovering from extra-visual meanings, that customize the artistic object.

The object does not abolish the feeling, it only balances it. It is special to engage, through this kind of forms of minimalism, the ethic and the esthetic.