As a remake of his rite of passage, emotionally scrutinised and travelled, this was the “Pictograms” Exhibition, under the signature of the painter Dan Constantinescu (long ago called an emeritus colleague the “Crane”), which took place between March 16th and April 8th at SENSO Gallery.
„(…) I have always wanted to paint the time, which makes us understand differently the works created thousands of years ago. I have subjected to my own sensibility the images of the frescoes from Vladimir or Suzdal where I could touch the paintings made by Rubliov. I belong, body and soul, to the moment I cross on this Earth, but at the same time I cannot ignore what connects me to ancient art. (…) I paint ideas, moods of colourful greys, in which dark or light reds are screaming in the mystery of the church light…” – Dan Constantinescu, visual artist.
“In Egyptian writing and decoration – for this is the culture and civilisation to which the author meditates while painting – the recognisable, hence figurative signs-words, designate ideas. This kind of coding attracted him so intensively that the artist indulged himself in using whole fields of signs to convey, pertinently and insistently, his messages. Contemplating the fabulous scenes painted thousands of years ago and the sequence of repeated conventions endlessly: inserting the text into image, using the hierarchical perspective and the lack of the quantitative one, frontal representation of the torso and the profile used for the face and limbs, the principle of simultaneity, the colour vested with symbolic features, the magical character of representation, the sacred character of the text (<medou-netjer> –divine word – the Egyptians called their writing) – Dan Constantinescu explicitly takes iconographic elements and specific stylistic forms; used in imaginary constructions, they do not hide the originality of the proximal genre. (…) In the numerous inserts by which Dan Constantinescu delimits his images, a free, plain writing, he writes his fast and elegant flow, contrasting with the geometry of the overall construction; lines, columns and overlaps evoke the palimpsest; on its surface, time continues its work relentlessly, which only the intervention of the artist can stop or suspend“. – Doina Pauleanu Phd, art critic and manager of Art Museum in Constanta.
This event was conducted with the support of Catena Group, through Catena for Art Program, and the Fildas Art Foundation.
