Ion Iancut

With a vocation discovered early on and consistently cultivated over the years, Ion Iancuţ has built an unmistakable discourse in contemporary sculpture. His choice for morphologies with a special imaginative baggage features deep purposes, based on the adherence to the archaic culture that seeks its way through the  incessant experiences of the  timeliness. (…) The anthropomorphic element, ever-present in Ion Iancuţ's creation, does not arise from the desire to reveal customizable details that function under the sign of portraiture dominated by the mimetic intentions. The artist finds it more important to place the sculptural form (generally the elements of the artistic approach belonging to the volumetric regime, the pictorial or graphic discourse) at the core of a discussion about man, about the human condition, in an existential and philosophical perspective. There is, therefore, a certain theatrical perspective, which presupposes a contemplative distance, but which, at the same time, appeals to the viewer. The characters that inhabit the space of his works are "seen", as a rule, in motion, in unexpected angles, which preserve an  irrepressible impression of manifestation, of uninterrupted activity. They evoke the territory of mythology or literary legends (Adam; Centaur; the Prodigal Son; Ulysses) or may impose symbolic images (various embodiments of the Light Seeker). The space of existence can be crossed by the lonely aoidos, a pervasive "observer" of the show of a lifetime. (…). Beyond the technical aspects (from this point of view, Ion Iancuţ's virtuosity is impressive), we are dealing with a homogeneous artistic universe".

Anthropomorphic

Constantin Prut

May, 2012

There is a trend in Fine Arts, active for many centuries, which summarises, in forms and compositional allegories a surprising typological unity, that face of mankind, which in literary expression corresponds to drama and tragedy. An art of the lost and heavy-laden spirit of the human being, an art of infernal Malebolge that mankind is forced to cross in the way of its salvation. A road that turns out to be endless, increasingly darker and tortuous. It is, if I may, the gloomy and twisted alternative of the paradisiacal projection grasped at by the human creature, the reality that most of us actually live, but which we most often refuse to see, despite its evidences. A nightmare that invades us, whether we want it or not, and which has been illustrated in the history of civilisation by the infinite suite of carnage and decrepit wandering, by the bestial insanity of the minds, which threatens even today the smattering of progress that mankind thinks it has achieved.

The arts have always been the conscious and merciless mirror of these destructive crises in the history of humanity. Exercising this feeling of tragic, with his entire moralising and admonishing vocation, he conceived great works and immortal artistic consciousness. But he's more than that! Their effect in time, associated with that of philosophers and theologians, moralists and poets, musicians and educators, did not find the proper echo in the consciousness of the nowadays mighty except with rare exceptions. A parallel destiny pushes mankind on the road of its own ruin.

This is Ion Iancuţ's present hypostasis, an artist with a sharp instinct of sense of civic duty, doubled by a profound religious fervour (but not mystic!), which confers a certain moral stature in support of his fine arts discourse.

The artist surprises his audience with a rich set of pastel compositions, endorsed by some of his famous sculptural creations. An exhibition with the consistency of fine arts vision and thematic stake one does not encounter at every turn. This because the artist himself exhibits a less common constancy in pursuing his favourite topics. The existence of the sordid and the banal, cross examined with the severity of the one accustomed to put everything into balance in the light of the great biblical and mythological models. He preposes the ephemeral of the duration and misery to the surviving essence. Iancuţ's world seems to be one of the sovereign powerlessness: elders,  beggars, uglesome, a vermicidal fauna, deprived of spirit, extracted from the paintings of Bosch and Bruegel,  wandering out of any cardinality. From time to time, a shade of candidness illuminates this closed, self-sufficient horizon: childhood and maternity. Two symbols with deep moral and Christian reverberation, which instil this amorphous space, of the redesign of the living only in its biological, rudimentary sense, with the alternative of its restoration through spirit, faith and cathartic action. The artist sets in motion the signs of primordial emotional and rational sublimity: the rediscovery of humanity through man himself, understood as redeemed. Iancuţ does not crucify his characters to cure them of the morbidity of spirit and feelings. He gives them the chance of revealed retrieval. Childhood and maternity hold, in the artist's view, the sacred power of recovering icons. Iancuţ seems to be warning us that failure to fulfill these models, in the natural composition of man, perpetuates the wandering of the world in the swamp of redemption. His drawings only amplify this warning at the level of an endless cortege of characters - the haughty spectra of powerlessness and lack of prudery - run through the infernal archetypal man. Both Dante and protester vision, which some call expressionism, but which, as an aesthetic and moral attitude, is old as time, Iancuţ belongs to this illustrious phalanx of artistic consciousness, fed by this evil slough of the world, in hope that his cry will once become a healer"!

CORNELIU ANTIM

Art Critic March 1995