2018-2019: Erotikonia

”Ioan Aurel Mureșan has a quality rarely seen in contemporary visual artists – he succeeds in hiding vast cultural accumulations behind his talent. Where others would get tensed up, he manages to handle things casually. He plays within and with the history of art, within and with the history of ideas with a nonchalance that combines certainties and obsessions, essentialities and ostentation, psychological finesse, and ideation solitudes. Each of his artworks is, in fact, a recourse to the entire story of the visual arts. Identifying this constant appeal to what had been going to be is part of the charm of any approach to Ioan Aurel Mureșan’s work. Simply by noticing the titles of the artworks from this exhibition, you realize that some sort of cultural legitimacy is an important constituent part of its message. The Hetairai series brings to mind the Ancient Greek sculpture, going up to Hetaira by Pablo Picasso; La belle jardinière reminisces the work with the same title by Max Ernst; Baigneuse, again to some of Picasso’s paintings; Other Voices, Other Rooms is the title of the debut novel by Truman Capote; The Persian Divan makes you think of Montaigne but also of Cantemir and Sadoveanu; to say nothing of Hure Thallo, a wordplay, which would translate as the Whore Spring, while the Foundation of Youth’s direct reference to Cranach the Elder is made by the author himself. This cultural agglomeration, this abundancy could easily slide into demonstrative, into ideating mannerism, have not Ioan Aurel Mureșan had the capacity to always place them on a secondary plane, to mask them, to transform them into “shades” of the painterly space and mere footnotes of a poetics and of a highly individualized poietics. In other words, it is a game of the history of art, by simply making art. I use the term game (as it was defined by Huizinga) because I find it very close to the spirit of the artist: the game means freedom, it’s something different from the nude reality and, above all, it puts things in order, brings order, even if, in Ioan Aurel Mureșan’s case, it’s an order of a space of the imagination. This flirtation with the cultural order and its civilizational structures translates into an easily identifiable visual show: the artist knows how to create, in visual propositions perfectly balanced, what I would call purifying illusions. The relocation of the feminine body from the grotesque of animality and its (re)turn to the size of the Eros means nothing else than the contamination with diaphanous of the world.

Human body, chimeras, impulsions, imaginary, diaphanous, game, landmark: these are concepts without which you cannot approach Ioan Aurel Mureșan’s art. He has entitled his exhibition Erotikonia, made-up name, with a wide-open semantic palette, as both constituent words are carrying extended meanings – both terminological and cultural: Ἔρως – desire, love and eἰκών – image, drawing, depiction, figure, icon (εικόνα) but also chimera, imagination, apparition, mirage. “The imaginary force of Eros is so strong that it structures almost all symbolic forms of culture”, confesses the artist. This is exactly why the latter meanings indicate the struggle against the limit the artist is involved in, in an attempt – both obstinate and condescend at times – to escape the real, the attempt of an existential escapist striving to break away from a here and now too cynical and too devoid of sense, void of meanings, and a-cultural. From imagined worlds (the above-mentioned constant recourse to the history of art), he manages to build a world in his own imaginary. In fact, he appropriates the collective imaginary as his own good.

In Ioan Aurel Mureșan’s view, the feminine body has two archetypal qualities: desire/offering (the transformation of sexuality into Eros) and the annihilation of the instinct of death, a clear anti-thanatotic dimension. Painterly, these are endowed with the charm of the individual real at a time when we are trying to survive the “desert of the real itself”. You cannot but ask what sphere of meanings the representation of the feminine body can occupy today when the assault of nakedness in all its forms seems to have won the battle for good. We are not talking here about morality and immorality, but about quantity. Does the feminine body hold any more mysteries, does it still have a meta-language that has not been deconstructed by an entire industry of lascivious abandonment? Is it still an interval between us and something beyond us? Ioan Aurel Mureșan’s Hetairai are this very interval, this passage to something else. The painter joins the ranks of those that Henri-Pierre Jeudy was talking about in Le corps comme objet d’art, of those that persist in “holding the original enigma of the body”, persistence that contains the faith in an ever-possible short-circuiting of the stereotypes, allows the perpetuation of the illusion of deconstructing the interpretation models by the covertly return of the cultural heterology of the images of the body. Thus, the body remains the pedestal of aesthetic idealism.

A heteromorphic view of the feminine body is also what Ioan Aurel Mureșan advances. The same body-substance can “crystallize” differently, depending on the visual and cultural characteristics you are endowing it with. Why has the painter chosen the hetairai as main theme? In Ancient Greek, ἑταίρα meant companion. Today we might call them escorts, but it wouldn’t cover the whole original meaning. In Ancient Greece they were offering not only bodily pleasures. They formed a class apart, of educated, cultivated women, able to carry a conversation on equal terms with men. Apparently, they were free women, that managed to be self-sufficient. The masculine hetairoi referred to the groups of men from the elite that took part in the notorious symposia. Its feminine counterpart could not designate simple prostitutes. In the end, it is a visual attempt to restore the rights of the feminine body, with all its attributes, from the simple visual show, going through seduction to the proximity of the revelation. The task is not at all easy, if aberrant ideologies try to rob the body, and particularly the feminine body, of, not much so the mystery, but the sacred dimension it has always had. A sacred dimension which, rigorously speaking, the entire culture is founded on.

Henri-Pierre Jeudy was also noting: The universal principle of recognizing all cultures is sustained by the reference to the sovereignty of the body. . . The body was assigned with the representation of the concept of culture. It serves as an “authenticity certificate”. Ioan Aurel Mureșan is returning to the sublime, to perfection, to enchantment, to spell, even if, apparently, only in a space of the imaginary. The erotic imaginary, ruled by Eros and not (only) the root of carnality is unlimited and open to all the spaces of the culture; it is also a passage between the profane and the sacred, fact that we know already from Platon’s Banquet: Love . . . is intermediate between mortal and immortal . . . a great daemon. . . The entire world of the daemonic is intermediate between divinity and mortality. With obvious psychoanalytical reflexes, Ioan Aurel Mureșan is crediting the Hellenistic tradition according to which Eros is a germinative and driving force, that both creates and perpetuates the things in this world. Visually, there is nothing able to express it more concretely, to contain its essentiality than the image of the feminine body. Eros is a force that “is guiding everything”, a moving prime, a driving force, as I said, obviously forged on a sexual model. Eros is the one that is incessantly conceiving in that space of transition between the material and the immaterial (today we call it imaginary, the Greeks had named it soul) where beauty emerges.

Taking a close look at the artworks that make up Erotikonia, it seems that, in the absence of any certainty – the artist doesn’t even look like to be interested in the grainy, earthy certainties, rather in their reflections in the sphere of that that can be imagined – the meanings that Ioan Aurel Mureșan proposes hide in the lines written by Vladimir Solovyov: Eros’ mission may be only that of transmitting the immortality of that part from our nature which is doesn’t possess per se, as it is usually absorbed in the material veil of procreation and death. And thus, the second term of the binomial enters the scene, Thanatos. The dragons from Ioan Aurel Mureșan’s paintings could be invested with suffocatingly numerous interpretations. In the Make-up As Celebration the creature imagined by the artist looks more like a gryphon. Zeus’ guardians or bearers of the absolute evil? The smashed dragon skulls represent, in the Christian tradition, the victory of Christ over evil and death. Biblically, the resemblance between the body of the dragon and that of the woman (Mondragon, Rosa canina) has an apocalyptical resonance: Its tail swept a third of the stars out of the sky and flung them to the earth. The dragon stood in front of the woman about to give birth, so that it might devour her child the moment he was born. (Revelation 12:4) Instead, Ioan Aurel Mureșan’s dragons have a quite hallucinatory ambivalence – they are thanatology signs, but they also embody a demiurgic principle, the Immortals mounting the flying dragons on their way up to Heaven. Like the feminine body, we can suspect they are too symbols of the passage from the real to the imaginary, from the earthly to the celestial, that eerie celestial, pure and amalgamated, proposed by the painter. The meanings of apparition, mirage of eikona are more here obvious.

But it would be an immense and unforgivable interpretative mistake to see in these paintings nothing else than an attempt to revalue the feminine body and the openings it is the bearer of. We also find in them a fascinating purity of seduction – of carnal seduction, of bodily seduction because, in the end, this is where it all starts from: “‘beauty’ and ‘attractiveness’ are originally properties of the sexual object”. The Voyeurism series comes with a compositional element with powerful erotic connotations: the window (all paintings are highly rigorous in the compositional organization, in the sequencing of the planes; and the frame, the window, the delimitation of multiple independent planes in the painterly space, is a constant in the works that make up Erotikonia). Through the window, which is a limitation of the view by cropping the world, a body of a woman could be seen as standing for the lowest zone, the guilty zone of Eros, but at the same time the window amplifies the desire and the feeling of powerlessness. And, therefore, in the imaginary defined by the painter, a secondary sound is inscribed, another imaginary, that of the one suspected of looking. In fact, isn’t this what we have been doing from the very beginnings, peeping at the idea of good, of beautiful, but without having any direct access to them at any time? Nothing that is human is foreign to us. Neither the strive for holiness, nor the longing for a body of a woman-mirage.

Compositionally flawless, as I have said, the paintings have a powerful force of expression born out of a fanciful mix, from both a stylistic and a symbolic standpoint. It is this very mix, misleadingly chaotic – because the artist works with ideation structures by no means accidental – that the solitude derives from, the singularity of Ioan Aurel Mureșan’s art. You cannot dislocate anything from the symbolic complex deployed without lessening the whole. The images only have a hybrid appearance, without being so at all. Endorsed by enduring colors – particularly the Pompeian red, which, in turn, adds a supplementary layer of the imaginary to the already existing ones –, the symbols are hidden and, at the same time, revealed in all the artworks: fantastical flowers, carnivorous plants, animals (some hybridized), strange birds, the shadows of bodiless creatures, rivers, backgrounds made up of hills, knolls (all having more than a compositional role). Everything could be a bearer of Eros or part of it, everything is molding the world imagined by Ioan Aurel Mureșan. The style is an almost conceptualized mix of styles, ranging from the abstract to the figurative, from symbolism to neo-expressionism, with direct references to street art.

Eros is the main character of this exhibition that glides between carnality and ideal, between voyeurism, diaphanous, and ingenuous with an easiness that only great artists are capable of. Freewheeling but rational, playing within and with his own imagination, but representing an entire cultural history, in Erotikonia Ioan Aurel Mureșan gives an answer, in his turn, to a question once asked by Nicolae Steinhardt: “What today’s man hungers for? For love and meaning.”