Fragment from Observator cultural No. 150 / 31 January - 6 February 2008
Contemporary art is a territory of confrontation, of sincere experiences, underlining a complex phenomenon of cultural, social, faith of principle diversity. Such as we find it in the young artists’ works, it does not “evade” from the social impact zone, it is reactive, and the freedom of discourse is in many cases surprising.
A series of traditional genres have relevance in contemporaneousness, imagistic models are taken over, but, in the same time, we meet a practice of unconventional, controversial methods, result of attitude, in which parody plays an essential part. What becomes determinant is contextualisation, the strategy which the artist assumes and promotes not only by means of visual image, but also by means of texts. For Dragos Burlacu, painting is a “poetics of search”. His cycles talk about a universe seen as a whole, a world which belongs both to man and animals, nature, instinctive reactions, subconscious, as much as to rational knowledge. The author’s preferences, such as they are read from the exhibited works, incline towards messages in which we find the power to take refuge, to discover the saving solution in critical situations; the instinct for survival is the luminous spot, it’s the promise of a future full of hopes.
We discover, in his works, problems of the contemporary world, from pollution to war, to man’s capacity to live a dimension of humanism for which birth and death are essential reference marks. His pictorial ability is based on chromatic subtleties, on transparencies which make capital out of the great tradition of this language and in which we discover humanity’s values in the simplest things.
The three young artists present at Veroniki Art Gallery sustain their suggested messages through texts, as well. It’s a surprising world at first sight, but in which we recognize our epoch, our fellows and habitudes. We find a transfer of traditional values to contemporaneousness, a critical look upon them, a lucid, many times cynical, analysis of some truths, but their message does not lack vitality or the bliss of understanding daily things which always take us by surprise. I’d say it is a true, diverse world in which we meet five personal visions that we’ll have to observe further on in the future.