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Maria Magdalena Crisan
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Dan Popescu
Cosmin Nasui
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Zoltan Bela / Dragos Burlacu
Free Your Mind…
Observatorul Cultural, No. 193, November 2003
In the suite of the recent exhibitions from Bucharest cymae – starting with those of this year’s graduates – the exhibition opened at the end of October at Apollo gallery has a slightly different status, even singular, if we refer to the age of the artist. Though still young, Dragos Burlacu suggests, with a surprising maturity, a reflexive and ethical exercise at the same time, a necessary confession about the condition of the creative act and of its “participants” at the present tense. Called Insomnia, the exhibition reunites works of big and small dimensions, all of them centred on the self, on the individual eaten within by questions, haunted by nightmares and visions which try to communicate, to stir reactions and to get an answer about identity, models and imaginary perspectives.
Found close to the “zero degree” of self-definition – at the first personal exhibit in Bucharest, after a debut at the Alfa gallery in Bacau, four prizes and some notable participations to collective and group exhibitions - , Dragos Burlacu uncovers himself as a cerebral guy, open to experiment, but careful with options, an artist who knows that superficiality is a permanent danger and for whom exigencies of truth surpass purely formal aspirations or the pleasures of the beautiful. If insomnia presupposes an intense psychism, nourished by anguishes and unfulfillments, for him it seems to be more like a support and an unconscious filter of the need of expression by means of art.
His interrogations regard, mainly, not the contemplative value of the image, not the virtues of pictorial matter or the qualities of the plastic sign, but the actuality of the message and the power of the ideative content, articulated on the hardly examinable dominant of self-referentiality. This does not mean that everything which rises to the surface of his canvas comes from virgin traceless, echo-less depths. We find various suggestions and influences, from Robert Rauschenberg (through Combine Painting technique) to Chuck Close (the hypertrophy of physiognomic details from photographs by means of a squares), or from Gerhard Richter (the photographic insertion of some moving characters) to Francis Bacon (horrific portrayal distortions suggesting man’s alienation and fragile psychic equilibrium). Nevertheless, all of them belong to a natural exercise, to a poetic of the search, becoming and knowledge of the self, achievable only through assimilations and consecrated valuable reference. Compared to his prior works – “Traffic” series exhibited at the beginning of the year at the New Gallery, part of the exhibition “Beyond photography… painting…” – we stylistically and semantically witness now, however, a change of register. The artist has passed from categorical hyperrealism to a nuanced figurative neo-expressionism; from polemical recovery of some famous motifs in the history of painting to the integration and amplification of the fragments of daily imaginary; from diurnal register to the nocturnal one; and, technically, from painting in oil and collage to more complex approaches, to a mixed language which combines painting with photography, video art and digital interventions.
Even if the young exhibitor has incontestable capacities in structuring the plastic space (on big two-dimensional props) and even if he masters the science of accords and chromatic alternations (between orange colours “burned” by the bulb and the brown colours or the grey ones powered by the mystery of the night), his presence, further on, on the land of painting is - I think – open to question. Beyond the rigour of the painted surfaces, multiple alternative universes, speculatively inscribed within the depth of the virtual space, get open for Dragos Burlacu. If, until now, his chief mediums were painting and photography, in a relationship of reciprocal addictions and change, starting with this exhibition the artist is tempted - ludicrously, but pragmatically, too, if we think of the major tendencies from Occidental contemporary art - to explore and exploit new possibilities of configuration of the visual discourse, by means of the new media. Away from the routine of the gestures learned in the university years and of the canons of the two-dimensional representations, Dragos seems to be free to try. Consequently, we wish him as fertile insomnias as possible and… free your mind… but not completely!
Observatorul Cultural, No. 193, November 2003
In the suite of the recent exhibitions from Bucharest cymae – starting with those of this year’s graduates – the exhibition opened at the end of October at Apollo gallery has a slightly different status, even singular, if we refer to the age of the artist. Though still young, Dragos Burlacu suggests, with a surprising maturity, a reflexive and ethical exercise at the same time, a necessary confession about the condition of the creative act and of its “participants” at the present tense. Called Insomnia, the exhibition reunites works of big and small dimensions, all of them centred on the self, on the individual eaten within by questions, haunted by nightmares and visions which try to communicate, to stir reactions and to get an answer about identity, models and imaginary perspectives.
Found close to the “zero degree” of self-definition – at the first personal exhibit in Bucharest, after a debut at the Alfa gallery in Bacau, four prizes and some notable participations to collective and group exhibitions - , Dragos Burlacu uncovers himself as a cerebral guy, open to experiment, but careful with options, an artist who knows that superficiality is a permanent danger and for whom exigencies of truth surpass purely formal aspirations or the pleasures of the beautiful. If insomnia presupposes an intense psychism, nourished by anguishes and unfulfillments, for him it seems to be more like a support and an unconscious filter of the need of expression by means of art.
His interrogations regard, mainly, not the contemplative value of the image, not the virtues of pictorial matter or the qualities of the plastic sign, but the actuality of the message and the power of the ideative content, articulated on the hardly examinable dominant of self-referentiality. This does not mean that everything which rises to the surface of his canvas comes from virgin traceless, echo-less depths. We find various suggestions and influences, from Robert Rauschenberg (through Combine Painting technique) to Chuck Close (the hypertrophy of physiognomic details from photographs by means of a squares), or from Gerhard Richter (the photographic insertion of some moving characters) to Francis Bacon (horrific portrayal distortions suggesting man’s alienation and fragile psychic equilibrium). Nevertheless, all of them belong to a natural exercise, to a poetic of the search, becoming and knowledge of the self, achievable only through assimilations and consecrated valuable reference. Compared to his prior works – “Traffic” series exhibited at the beginning of the year at the New Gallery, part of the exhibition “Beyond photography… painting…” – we stylistically and semantically witness now, however, a change of register. The artist has passed from categorical hyperrealism to a nuanced figurative neo-expressionism; from polemical recovery of some famous motifs in the history of painting to the integration and amplification of the fragments of daily imaginary; from diurnal register to the nocturnal one; and, technically, from painting in oil and collage to more complex approaches, to a mixed language which combines painting with photography, video art and digital interventions.
Even if the young exhibitor has incontestable capacities in structuring the plastic space (on big two-dimensional props) and even if he masters the science of accords and chromatic alternations (between orange colours “burned” by the bulb and the brown colours or the grey ones powered by the mystery of the night), his presence, further on, on the land of painting is - I think – open to question. Beyond the rigour of the painted surfaces, multiple alternative universes, speculatively inscribed within the depth of the virtual space, get open for Dragos Burlacu. If, until now, his chief mediums were painting and photography, in a relationship of reciprocal addictions and change, starting with this exhibition the artist is tempted - ludicrously, but pragmatically, too, if we think of the major tendencies from Occidental contemporary art - to explore and exploit new possibilities of configuration of the visual discourse, by means of the new media. Away from the routine of the gestures learned in the university years and of the canons of the two-dimensional representations, Dragos seems to be free to try. Consequently, we wish him as fertile insomnias as possible and… free your mind… but not completely!
© 2009 Dragos Burlacu