Radu Şerban

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Radu erban, November 1st 2010

TransAppearences was initially the title of a digital animation I created in 2005, in fact a

meditation-essay on the world we live in, on the mystery of light and life. It was both a glance in

times mirror and in the mirror of a window set in the wooden wall of a church. The visual

project was built around certain elements bearing philosophical, religious and symbolicmeaning: light, life, water, mirror, window and icon, pretexts for inducing an introspective state,

a meditation on ones self and on ones relation to the world.

Transappearance refers to a newly-created world with a specific spiritual reality, in which the

referent object is transposed in an autonomous image, without a narrative support. The

transappearance can also be the background game, the game of the mind that operates with

artistic concepts, the ineffable game of feelings and is, of course, in the same time, the game of

language.

I believe that my artistic activity over the past twenty years can be easily framed by this concept,

because it brings together certain terms of experiencing reality (the lived experience): discovery,

amazement, happiness, fulfillment, obsession and the terms of experiencing the visual

language: synthesis, reformulation, adequateness, spontaneity, gesture, re-becoming, and

playfulness.

The works in this catalogue have been grouped in seven distinct cycles, according to the time

when they were created, the stylistics of the images and the employed technical solutions. In

the succession of works, the Final Image is extremely varied based on the difference in

dimensions (from very small to very large formats), primary material (wood, paper, canvas),

technique (from traditional ones, such as egg-emulsion painting on prepared wooden board, to

present-day ones, such as digital animation and digital print), and style (from a strong figurativedecanted character, to allusive abstraction) of each individual artwork.

Clin Stegerean, director of Cluj-Napoca Art Museum

At the time of change in Romanias political paradigm in the end of year 1989, Raduerban was preoccupated in the direction of a painting that explored the means ofexpressing a spirituality foreign to the official art, one referring to the pictorial structuresof wall painting religious art in Bucovina, in the technique of egg tempera, typical foricons on wood.

The following years lead to the maturing of these means and the approach of a directioninterfluent up to a point with the neo-orthodox expression trend that became noted inBucharest during the 90s. Radu erban nevertheless maintained a certain distanceagainst this trend by turning to a non-manifest figurativeness rather expressed through


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formal allusions than through an artistic epiphany of a religious inventory of themes. Inthe same time, the new social and political conditions after 1989 allowed him access tocultural areas fundamental to his artistic development, such as his research stays inItaly (1995) and Spain (1996), or his long Canadian sojourn (1997-2000).

Gradually, the human figure lost in corporeal consistency, the artist bringing into playcontaminations with the icons created in Nicula and naive art, incorporating an ingenuitythat brings his characters closer to the candor in childrens drawings. They do notremain isolated in this component because the human figure is associated to otherelements that incorporate it in rustic universes or populate various spaces associated toprevious themes (Byzantium), abandoning two-dimensional surfaces and invading theterritory of objects in space, on the surfaces of which they relate to largely plasticcomponents.

No matter the cycles to which they can be associated (The Woman, Imagined Portraits),his human figures gradually acquire a second-degree role, both as meaning and in

importance in the visual field, in favor of the surfaces general composition that aimsincreasingly at revealing a discourse of shapes and colors holding plastic value inthemselves.

Therefore, in his last cycles of works (The Patina of the Wall, Invented Landscapes), thehuman figure gradually evaporates or simply disappears, making way for a visualspectacle whose aim can even be that of integrating the human being in an existentialamalgam that leads, eventually, to its actual disappearance.The disappearance of the human figure from the telluric coordinates coincides with theartists approach of a new theme Unidentified Characters through the means ofdigital photography techniques and computer animation.This spiritual dimension is nevertheless rather signaled by the certainty of a presence,of a double, of an immaterial stalker that the physical light of the projector ideaticallysupports, than by a relation mainly instituted through ones adherence to a set ofreligious practices.

The dynamics of his personal schedule, apparently marked by the motto ''ora et labora'',his attentive and reflexive nature, his plus of intelligence, creativity and surprisingoriginality with each new exhibition made Radu erban an artist from whom we canexpect the revelation through art of still hidden meanings of our human experience.

Liviana Dan, Contemporary Art Gallery curator, Brukenthal Museum, Sibiu

... Radu Serban is an image researcher himself. In his representation, the multiplereality is as complex as the images reality. Research in painting is on the edge: havingto radically paint a last image. Radu Serban is aware of the fact that society can easilyturn its loyalty from one aesthetic manner to another. The joy towards painting and thespecial interest showed for, in Radu Serbans case, lyrical abstraction, remains anessay for better times. A well known German theorist, Wilhelm Worringer, considers


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abstraction like an imense need for silence. Radu Serbans psychological approachinduced in this exhibition is, in fact, an imense need for silence.

(speech for Radu Serbans opening at the Imagined Places, Things and Faces

exhibition, UAP Gallery, Sibiu, 2009)

Livia Dragoi,

PhD Director of the Cluj-Napoca Art Museum

Radu Serban belongs to a generation which, somewhat programatically, somewhat

ostentatiously, showed a marked evolution in the last two decades in a fertile postmodern

experimental space. In this space, where he moves with a certain composed discretion, Radu

Serban has slowly and steadily defined a territory of his own.

This has been achieved by ordering his entire protean creation around a stable and irradiatingnucleus: his vocation as a painter who is gifted with a peculiar sensitivity, poetic and reflexive in

its nostalgic source.

A refined colourist and a virtuoso of drawing, the artist is also tempted by the technical

possibilities of the new media. He creates unusual hybrid objects through an inventive mix of

media, techniques and languages. His voyages in the multi- and intermedial area and in the

fusions of traditional and unconventional, modern media remain, however, complementary to his

passionate investigations in his main field: painting.

They are, in fact, opportunities to expand, within an integrating approach, the artistic issues

specific to the universe of his painting.

Beyond the ingenious manipulations of digital images with new techniques, languages and

artistic codes belonging to various fields (visual arts, film, music), the integrating postmodernist

vocation, specific to the artists vision, can be seen in his way of approaching tradition, by

subjectively assuming (through memory and remembering) some of the eternal values from the

heritage of the Romanian culture and civilisation.

This type of subjective archeology steadily favours the Transylvanian village staple of the

artists childhood and adolescence, an affection-laden formative topos, which introduces in his

creation motives and archetypal themes of discreet symbolic or metaphorical relevance. It also

determines a positioning of the author in an existential horison which is infused by the sacred.

This is a space which is carefully ordered by rules established through the long experience of

individual and community life, allowing the discovery and cultivation of ones own interior world

according to the characteristics of the Romanian peasants soul: the authentic thrill of the

sacred, the longing for cleanliness and absolution, the joy of living in harmony with nature...

Discovering, through remembrance, his connection with this universe, the artist gives priority to


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one of its main coordinates, light. It is the source of life and vision, and of moral truth and

justice, the energetic exponent of the supreme Presence which is beyond what can be seen.

This is either diffuse light, which, in the wait for the descending transcendence, crowns,

protects, soothes, elevates and redeems, or active light, which, together with coloured matter

and drawing, builds shapes and images, or changes them perpetually when mirrored in thewater. In other words, light becomes the decisive factor in the spectacular marriage of reality

and dream, of truth and phantasm, of concrete and abstract, leading to an authentic, vibrant and

persuasive spritualising of vision.

Ramona NOVICOV, art critic

Painting as body and fallow field - a dark, dense and sealed place which needs to be

ploughed deeply, over and over again in order to reveal once more its particles of light.That is why image as concevied by Radu Serban, can only be created throughreversible routes, descent - ascent, crypt - throne, gate - shield, hearth - cupola.

The pictorial space is a closed one, dark and mysterious, yet the forms which it containsare protected, often by a pristine background, wavelike as virgin canvas. Sometimesthese forms become so personified that they detach themselves from the rigidity of theirprotective space to stand singular and volatile as if they were the wings of a fragile altar.Lightly sketched, such forms allow themselves to become protected only by the warmthof the wood of the old destructured assemblages.

With a sensitive presence, delicate and yet monumental, the painters forms advancevertically towards a purely interior space; an outpost barely still visible, a times at theboundary between here and there. Luminous and warm these forms rise like acupola, like dough, tending to grow in their fullness to fill, the entire space within whichthey are contained. Sometimes this expansion of interiority leads the two dimensionalimage towards an objectivized state wherein its formal Limit becomes extremelysensitive.

The purity, suppleness and amplitude of the forms is supported by a painting techniqueof privileged plasticity. The artist employs, in a modern yet thorought rigorous manner,the time honoured iconographic technique of painting in egg tempera, laden withspirituality. The matte velvet lustre of the tempera enables a brush stroke to attain atender expressivness, rapidly attenuated yet still preserved in the chromatic vibration ofits texture.

This explains why the art of Radu Serban has a pronounced votiv character. His imagesoften appear to be "worshipping or offering, controled by the transmundane hierarchy,while the painter himself demonstrates that he is a witness whonever ceases to seekthe optimal form of introspection. Thus the palimpsest of his message has a


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Testament as its primordial text.

In the spirit of this message, the painters figures are solitary, having a virginlike andcontemplative presence. They have a shadowy gaze calligraphically traced withdescending lines which amplify their melancholic expressiveness, bearing the slightly

amazed peace of thouse who have passed the ordeal of their tribulations. Wide openeyes and sealed mouths underline the fact that contemplation is purely introspective.Beyond the silence of these figures the epidermic pulse and rustling of the paintersmedium animates the richness of the image.

Radu Serban knows and senses all of this, he is touched by a yearning for thatluminous Distance, deep and high like the darkness of a well that reflects the stars ofmidday. He realizes that to paint a world in which material is constructed verticaly is tofeverishly and yet faithfuly await the moment, when as the prophet said, Your light willarise from the dark, and your darkness shall become the light of the day.

Alexandru Vlad, poet and writer

Radu Serban uses in his art two coordonates: reference and particularization or carving.

Reference towards an iconic art, an art of the traditional Romanian icons with its Byzantineorigin, its special script and its well-known aesthetic His proposition is the carving, which is

of an amazing modernity. If the reference is esoteric, then carving is of a modern and

personal esoterism. Inside this carving lays his proposition for modernity. Here lays a modern

understanding of space. If Byzantine art is a passage that leads towards perfection, which, as

Sorin Dumitrecu, was already reached by predecessors, this carving is what Radu Serban

proposes and leads it on its own way.

Its a plastic re-reading, a postmodernism, a use of reference in a modern way. Things overlap

later like in a palimpsest; in some works, colour, the suggestion of summer, of an old wall, of a

time-consumed colour; but, generally, I would mention and underline that this carving is the

window from which I saw this artists modernity.

TV show at TV Cluj, October 1993

Pavel Suar, art critic


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Painting as a spiritual exercise

Radu Serbanis completely detached from the strict problems of language (problems that

absorb most of his generations colleagues) and, second, he manages to integrate in the most

unobtrusive area of contemporary Romanian painting, in whose shadow two great melancholists

watchFlorin Mitroi and Ilie Boca. This vein of the Romanian art, frail at first sight, but of greatspiritual stamina, entails some defining coordonates: the absence of any kind of

ostentatiousness, the harsh selection of the expressive means, the unsterile beauty and the

almost mystic obiedence to the object

His vision has a Byzantine filiation, but in a way that exclude outer landmarks. Regarding this

path, only the images spirit can be distinguished, as well as the compozitional grimness and th e

objects evanescence. The image used in the composition, regardless of the real nature of the

object, calls up the artists participatory sensitivity in a way that makes it receive the entire

authority of the portrait. In fact, all works offer a hidden portraiture, even if in the immediate

expression they convey a human face, a bowl or an apple.

Despite the intuition of the spiritual load of objects and their registration in a record of plastic

thinking, Radu Serban tackles painting by selecting his means in a severe, austere way. His

canvases become transparent through the ethereal of brush traces, and colour loses any

material quality. The registry of tones doesnt reach over brown, ocher or English red, and the

neutral backgrounds create wide veils on which compositions clot in a sensitive way that hides

both knowledge and effort.

This great capacity of observing, almost in an oriental way, the common soul of things and of

plastically expressing it along with its entire moral load, reveals one of the yo ung painters

greatest qualities.

published in the Cultural Observer, Bucharest, October 1991

Mircea oca, art criticRadu Serban - Painting and drawing exhibition

Radu Serban is a modern artist because he doesnt make any discrimiantionbetweengenres. He doesnt set borders between them. He creates art. And he does it with

inspiration, under the gifted, fruitful signs of the emotion and thinking happily joint withfeeling. But the young painter and drawer is a modern artist also due to his abstracting,due to the way he decreases the plastic language to its basic components, and becauseof how he purges expression in order to translate it into signs the already reduced to thecore forms.

No matter how modern, on a closer look, through all these, Radu Serban is actuallysubscribing into the prestigious tradition of the Romanian vintage stylization, which


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spreads from the famous Moldavian frescos of Stefan the Great and Petru Rares age toDimitrie Paciureas Madona Stolojan. As an excuse for the subtle black and whiteinterpretations, some of these elements have fresco fragments and orthodox worshipobjects with a worthy, ancestral character. These, and I underline this, are just excusesfor figuration. Radu Serban starts from them with enthuziasm, boldness, but also with

cleverness and skill in order to create compositions with a high level of rigor and withcomplex, admirable and inspired layouts, that represent not only components, but maincharacters of the plastic discourse.

In thisTransylvanian fruitful, autumn afternoons peace, I have attended the plastic,chromatic, and graphic discourse of the exceptional, unmistakable compositions thatwear the signature of an artist of real and original talent, that is Radu Serban. Thisdiscourse reminded me of another afternoon, this time a Toscan one, when, while sittingin a Romanic church, I have attended a Bach-music organ concert. It is with the organssound that the phrasings and rythms of Radu Serbans recent painting and drawingresemble.

published in the Adevarul de Cluj, Cluj-Napoca, October 1993.

Mircea Petean, editor, poet and writerBeyond the threshold

Far from being headed with iron, Radu Serbans gates dont close unless they areopening and they are open to protect, inside the space of a static and severe interior,the traces of sacredness which translates into both objects and faces, perceivedpersonally but also in the extension of a century-old traditionas poses of some

miraculous moments of a Christian mythology that is fixed in the framing of ancientry.

The Gate of all gates. Through it, one can enter Radu Serbans art like entering awood church from Maramures. A space of Self-retrieval. And of Absolute. Space ofRevelation, of consecutive discoveries, and of a balance given by the consciousness ofbelonging to a reeking world, behind which archetypes exist and productively act.

Archetypes that belong to a living Christianity, one that is experienced in the immediateand direct act of life.

His artistic work is characterized by a great resource frugality. Simplicity and refinement.A discretion that reaches the edges of the most pure humility, imprisonment andabasement. A subtle revelation of an inside that palpates its abyss. Radu Serbansdraw-signs are the work of a scrupulous craftsman who miraculously knows how togive depth and relief to the insignificant surface of the paper. They are also the work ofa gifted artist: scratching the roughness of the concrete, he discovers traces of anancient writing, which he amazinglyamazement that goes beyong astonishmentwhich, consequently, becomes a vertigo - knows how to replay its lost significancies.His art has something from the fascination of a palimpsest.


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Mircea Petean, Draw-signs of Radu Serban exhibition catalogue, Cluj-Napoca,October 1996

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Radu Şerban