"At
Heaven's Gate, reveals a new facet of this personality: an artist of great
conceptual power, whose programme is carried out in a slightly taunting manner,
as his discourse compromises a streak of benign irony and reports itself polemically
to the Romanian tradition of landscape painting. Moreover, we discover in
him a ludic spirit, as his sober meditation is concealed by a presumption
of indifference and detachment; a precipitated, colloquial discourse which
is hidding its polemic ties with the succes myths of our traditional landscape
painting. It is an insidious, corrosive manner of attacking Grigorescu's basic
tenets, but one which paradoxical his present programme might seem, its aim
is to assimilate, in a critical, cotroversial manner, the tradition of Romanian
Landscape painting in which we rank with the best European artists. The idylic
character of the rural school and the lyricism of the old school of landscape
painting, the realistic representation of the motif, are replaced by a chromatic
hedonism (in the good sense of the word) that has assimilated the lesson of
modernism perfectly; the impressionist brush-stroke, at times the graphic
modulation and the voluptuousness of touch are the individual components of
his style. What is kept from Grigorescu* is the "colour-light" concept,
frantically embraced. Recomposed in the studio, the landscape reiterates the
colour impressions of nature, transforming them into a voluptuous game, in
which a permanent dialogue is established between the foreground and the depth
structures. The freedom of expression (assumed constantly, as a certificate
of belonging to contemporary art), the refusal of concrete details, the expurgation
of the rustic element from the landscape, all point to the city dweller who
has fled from an Arcadia whose Utopia is replaced by the modern values of
urban culture. His fresh sensitivity puts old subjects to new uses, with acuity
of exxpresion characteristic of the artists of the contemporary world. His
programme, convincing and sublime, is certainly a successful one".
Radu
Vasile, art critic
*
_ Grigorescu Nicolae 1835-1907; the most important impressionist romanian
painter, member of the Barbizon Group, Paris_
