Translation from Romanian
Raw art’s delight
Young artist’s Cristian Gaspar exhibition from Orizont Gallery in Bucharest, is called “Insectar” (“Collection of insects”) and it is under the pedagogical watch of his master, the painter and teacher Teodor Moraru.
It is his 5th personal exposition. But his artistic history is much more towering when we are talking about the art group E((O, with which he is exhibiting since 2000, and he is laying out his artistic availability and versatility in multimedia experiments and techniques, installations and performances, graffiti… In 2003 he won a grant for painting from the UAPR (Romanian Union of Plastic Artists).
The exhibition we can find in Orizont Gallery discloses the virtues of an artist with a very alive and jovial colorist sensibility, in which the pedant innuendo of childhood games is not a simple stylistic artifice. Cristian Gaspar’s lines which are delimitating the forms are “naive” on purpose, in a kind of freedom of the poetic fantasy. From the artist’s canvas is greeting us, with a lovable and irresistible normality, an universe filled with a comical pseudofauna of real creatures “cloned” with imaginary characters. In reality, the artist is animating a generous and hilarious world of characters in an almost idyllic scene painting, just like the fairytalish fables which lighten even today the faces of younger or elder children!
The mechanism of this playful act, in which the artist is trying to drag us, is profoundly rational and ingeniously mastered by the painter, by using methods of an art with newer provenances in allegoric concepts which were pictorial transformed 6 decades before Dubuffet. I wouldn’t dare to juxtapose Cristian Gaspar’s pictorial fantasies with so called principles of “raw art”, as they were formulated by the exponents of the “company” initiated by the French patron of the evanescent esthetic orientation from the ‘50s – ‘60s. But it seems obvious to me, in the new generation’s painting, not only from Romania, Dubuffet’s legacy is reconsidered, on purpose or not, in exercises and stylistic approaches in which improvisation, thematic and compositional aleatorism are juxtaposed detached and unforeseeable over the surrealist visions and virtuosity, but also over the powerful and primitive instinct or the innocent and naïve “dictee”. Some people express their own nature in this manner, which is hard to call “pictorial science”; others, who are intelligently dissimulating in studied gestures, often shown dazzling (in this transitory postmodernism, the sacred need for spectacle!) try to express their technical-artistic abilities and the originality of their own creative personality. Some artists became notorious in the Romanian artistic world, persons like Dumitru Gorzo, Claudia Todor, Anca Dinu, Laurentiu Dimisca, Vioara Bara, Dionisie Puscuta, Roxana Nicolae, Giuliano Naidin, Suzana Dan, Ecaterina Vrana and others, artists who are honoring and delighting in the same time the „raw art” in present times.
Through this exposition, particularly by its suave parody nature, subtle marked in the pictorial discourse by the chromatic expression, bright, but not harsh at all, by the elegance of the notation and by the fableish verve, just like in an imagistic “lego”, Cristian Gaspar enters in this lineage of a dubuffist postmodernism.
We have to point out, not particularly the rational controlled detachment of the comic antithesis and the cordial irony – instruments used cleverly and seductively – but the joy of playing Painting. A well directed exercise of innocent charges for the raw art’s delight.
I like to think that it is exactly the stake on which the artist bet. And this represents the prize he won today. An exposition of the visual confort in a gallant and innocent disposition of a quote from the recent (and frivolous) history of European painting. Which – I am sure of it – shall not mark at all his career and his further creative search. But through this intelligent and innocent „game” with which he is arousing our interest and the passion for what he is doing, and most of all for what he is thinking, in building his own creative destiny, Cristian Gaspar has won an adept who will faithfully follow his artistic evolution.
Author: Corneliu ANTIM
Ziarul Financiar 05.10.2007
Raw art’s delight
Young artist’s Cristian Gaspar exhibition from Orizont Gallery in Bucharest, is called “Insectar” (“Collection of insects”) and it is under the pedagogical watch of his master, the painter and teacher Teodor Moraru.
It is his 5th personal exposition. But his artistic history is much more towering when we are talking about the art group E((O, with which he is exhibiting since 2000, and he is laying out his artistic availability and versatility in multimedia experiments and techniques, installations and performances, graffiti… In 2003 he won a grant for painting from the UAPR (Romanian Union of Plastic Artists).
The exhibition we can find in Orizont Gallery discloses the virtues of an artist with a very alive and jovial colorist sensibility, in which the pedant innuendo of childhood games is not a simple stylistic artifice. Cristian Gaspar’s lines which are delimitating the forms are “naive” on purpose, in a kind of freedom of the poetic fantasy. From the artist’s canvas is greeting us, with a lovable and irresistible normality, an universe filled with a comical pseudofauna of real creatures “cloned” with imaginary characters. In reality, the artist is animating a generous and hilarious world of characters in an almost idyllic scene painting, just like the fairytalish fables which lighten even today the faces of younger or elder children!
The mechanism of this playful act, in which the artist is trying to drag us, is profoundly rational and ingeniously mastered by the painter, by using methods of an art with newer provenances in allegoric concepts which were pictorial transformed 6 decades before Dubuffet. I wouldn’t dare to juxtapose Cristian Gaspar’s pictorial fantasies with so called principles of “raw art”, as they were formulated by the exponents of the “company” initiated by the French patron of the evanescent esthetic orientation from the ‘50s – ‘60s. But it seems obvious to me, in the new generation’s painting, not only from Romania, Dubuffet’s legacy is reconsidered, on purpose or not, in exercises and stylistic approaches in which improvisation, thematic and compositional aleatorism are juxtaposed detached and unforeseeable over the surrealist visions and virtuosity, but also over the powerful and primitive instinct or the innocent and naïve “dictee”. Some people express their own nature in this manner, which is hard to call “pictorial science”; others, who are intelligently dissimulating in studied gestures, often shown dazzling (in this transitory postmodernism, the sacred need for spectacle!) try to express their technical-artistic abilities and the originality of their own creative personality. Some artists became notorious in the Romanian artistic world, persons like Dumitru Gorzo, Claudia Todor, Anca Dinu, Laurentiu Dimisca, Vioara Bara, Dionisie Puscuta, Roxana Nicolae, Giuliano Naidin, Suzana Dan, Ecaterina Vrana and others, artists who are honoring and delighting in the same time the „raw art” in present times.
Through this exposition, particularly by its suave parody nature, subtle marked in the pictorial discourse by the chromatic expression, bright, but not harsh at all, by the elegance of the notation and by the fableish verve, just like in an imagistic “lego”, Cristian Gaspar enters in this lineage of a dubuffist postmodernism.
We have to point out, not particularly the rational controlled detachment of the comic antithesis and the cordial irony – instruments used cleverly and seductively – but the joy of playing Painting. A well directed exercise of innocent charges for the raw art’s delight.
I like to think that it is exactly the stake on which the artist bet. And this represents the prize he won today. An exposition of the visual confort in a gallant and innocent disposition of a quote from the recent (and frivolous) history of European painting. Which – I am sure of it – shall not mark at all his career and his further creative search. But through this intelligent and innocent „game” with which he is arousing our interest and the passion for what he is doing, and most of all for what he is thinking, in building his own creative destiny, Cristian Gaspar has won an adept who will faithfully follow his artistic evolution.
Author: Corneliu ANTIM
Ziarul Financiar 05.10.2007