2013-2014: Ultrasilvania

”Mureșan synthetizes the various modalities of the landscape from the Romanian and European painting of the last two centuries, which he drastically purges and condenses through the optic filter provided by the modernist abstraction. The same above-mentioned tension, between figurative and abstract, between horizontals, diagonals, and verticals, materialized in the warm or cold chromatic tones, laid in think, heavy strokes, dominating all the registers of the compositions, confers the artworks a special vibration, of matter reduced to the essential” (see below).

Critical references

The “Ultra-landscapes” of Ioan Aurel Mureșan

Magda Cârneci

” Ioan Aurel Mureșan has been for a long time an influential name of the neo-expressionist movement from the visual generation of the Romanian ’80s. Starting with his first series Masks and Earths from the beginning of the ’80s, to the series Erotikonia from 2019, his evolution draws a glowing arc on the sky of the Romanian painting of the last decades.

Driven by gesture and fraught with materiality, bounded to a figurative both irreducible and fantastic, his art combines ingeniously a color impulsiveness, sometimes unleashed, sometimes refrained, with a subtle intellect, nourished by various philosophic, psychoanalytic, literary sources, as modern-postmodern as they are diverse. Painting is for Ioan Aurel Mureșan, as he confesses, a “play of metamorphoses in the service of the language”, where recurrent oscillations take place between the conscious and unconscious level of his creative self in a continuous transformation, attracted by either a sober figurative expressivity or an unrepentant imaginary exuberance.

The sober, “astringent” pole of Mureșan was illustrated from the very beginnings by the Earths series (1984) shown in the praised exhibition that took place at Atelier 35 from Bucharest. In those somber, grainy surfaces it was already manifest an attraction to a dense materism, a strange clenching between figurative and abstract, which resulted in a powerful impression of calcified pictoriality, pervaded by a tragic respiration of living the reality, which I would find later also at Anselm Kiefer.

The concentrated force of the “earths” would surface again in the series Ultrasilvania from 2013-2014, which is now on view. Created after seven years of artistic pause and recently rediscovered, this series incarnates, as the artist says, the reconciliation between the “historic genre of the landscape and the contemporary painting”. Resuming somehow the theme of the “earths”, Mureșan synthetizes the various modalities of the landscape from the Romanian and European painting of the last two centuries, which he drastically purges and condenses through the optic filter provided by the modernist abstraction. The same above-mentioned tension, between figurative and abstract, between horizontals, diagonals, and verticals, materialized in the warm or cold chromatic tones, laid in think, heavy strokes, dominating all the registers of the compositions, confers the artworks a special vibration, of matter reduced to the essential.

Some of the canvases, disclosing patches of self-sufficient geometric elements, unveil the mystery carried by the paintings, in which the figurative, the earthy crust, seems to cover the background structure, the abstract tissue of the compositions. And so, the artist’s explanation of the title of this series becomes clearer – “The ultra- particle carries a semiotic overcharge – something ‘beyond’, ‘further’, in a dense and purged form”. From Trans-silvania, passing through, along the forested zone, we arrive at Ultra-silvania, entering a register from beyond, a superior register of the image, which claims, by painterly density, the sphere of imagination, kept in the proximity of immediate perception, but having access to the principles of the compositional construction.

As I have said on some other occasion, the total annihilation of the coherent image of the real does not happen in Ioan Aurel Mureșan’s case, it is not possible. Despite the subdued interest for abstraction, as means of discovering unexpected meanings and associations, Mureșan’s art always maintains a foundation based on image. The figurative image, which insists on the experience in action of the painterly gesture, remains an active principle of these artworks, proving once again the balanced autochthonous sense of the visual, a tradition in which the painter has been baptized fully consciously.

Painting is situated for Ioan Aurel Mureșan somewhere between the two poles that mark his creativity, the pole of the matter and the neo-expressionist pole, an “exoreic” discourse, orientated to the outside, as he declares in a theoretical text. Self-referential offering, directed towards the world, seizing the hidden logic of our passionate relationship with the reality – what matters is that the painting is compelling, strongly believes the artist. In its refrained implosive exaltation, with a nuclear charge that sends its radiations from inside outwards, Ioan Aurel Mureșan’s painting from the series Ultrasilvania stands as impressive, powerful, it stands as compelling.”

(Magda Cârneci, “‘Ultrapeisajele’ lui Aurel Mureșan”, in Ioan Aurel Mureșan, Ultrasilvania: Painting as pharmakon, critical texts: Magda Cârneci, Ramona Novicov, Cătălin Davidescu, epilogue: Sorina Jecza, Timișoara: Editura Fundației Interart Triade, 2021, pp. 42-43)

The Fugitive View

Ramona Novicov

“… saw it hurrying, the river, which consisted of him and his loved ones and of all people, he had ever seen, all of these waves and waters were hurrying, suffering, towards goals, many goals, the waterfall, the lake, the rapids, the sea, and all goals were reached, and every goal was followed by a new one, and the water turned into vapor and rose to the sky, turned into rain and poured down from the sky, turned into a source, a stream, a river, headed forward once again, flowed on once again.”

Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

The Eidolon

Sever years spent in the total absence of painting become, for a painter, spectral like the desert. The initiation texts say that this is the span of a vital cycle, at the end of which the foundational resorts of the being are renewed. The fact is that sixteen years ago, Ioan Aurel Mureșan put down the brush, leaving for a while the kingdom of painting. Like Rimbaud, we could say, and the juxtaposition may be baffling. But the Painter didn’t do it purposefully, it was rather an involuntary step in the negative, like the faces on playing cards inverted in their opposite, in a reversed mirroring. Histrionic as he is, and, in addition, a Grand Master of metaphors, he found himself experimenting, unwillingly, how it is like not to be a painter. This meant that he felt behind, in an existential void, the ultra-colored painterly matter that had been so close to him, that it almost engulfed him in its opulent magma – so that, inert and mute, he hasn’t touched it for seven years. nu fii pictor. Asta a însemnat că a lăsat în urmă, într-un hău existenţial, materia picturală ultracolorată ce-i fusese atât de aproape, încât era pe punctul să îl resoarbă în opulenţa ei magmatică – așa încât inert şi mut, nu a mai atins-o timp de şapte ani.

From then on, The Silk Road, that beatific road that he has imagined and magnificently woven for ten years, to the glory and relish of Duke d’Ivry, was scattered with ash. The world of Levantine dragons and Scheherazade has been absorbed in the frame of the window of the railroad wagon that was taking him back and forth between Oradea and Cluj. His absence from the kingdom of painting equated a temporal and existential water lock that seems now to have been, at that time, the only viable solution able to lead him to a restart, a sign of redemption, of healing, and the premise of a new efflorescence. “Elegance is refusal” – said, apodictically, Diana Vreeland, the refined presence from Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. If we look at Ioan Aurel Mureșan’s refusal to paint, refusal that stood for a total fasting when it came to his daily nourishment – the chromatic paste, we can admire the exquisite elegance of his tribute paid to silence and absence. He was now travelling, in complete solitude, à rebours, a silent pilgrimage to the end of his being, without the rustle of silks and corteges of fantastic creatures. For seven years, immobile, he watched the world from the wagon’s window, like Siddhartha watched the river: a flowing ghost in which all that was known and unknown, all that existed or was imagined melted in and revived. Don’t act, don’t interfere, don’t get attached, don’t do anything – I imagine that the Painter was saying to himself – stay still and just watch the immense colored, living, pulsatile, indistinct, endless paste, the stream that flows in front of you, just be an impersonal sieve through which all the images that make up this world pass.

Abandoning himself to the automatic writing of the iron wheels, to their utterly exterior mechanical rhythm, he, the Painter, was experimenting a sort of ascetism, renouncing his talent as painter, contemplating his own powerlessness to speak any more about – and especially through – painting. Instinctively, in a way he was doing an exercise of cooling down the painting, of freezing its sensual matter, like the spectral wave that freezes Hokusai’s stamp in the air. He was the very wave, the world passed him by rapidly and his gaze couldn’t stop at anything, everything was equal to itself because everything was exterior to him. The whole world looked like a piece of garment turned inside out and rotating incessantly around his naked body. Naked and frozen. despre – şi mai ales prin -pictură. Instinctiv, făcea un fel de exerciţiu de răcire a picturii, de îngheţare a materiei ei senzuale, asemeni valului stihial ce încremeneşte în aer în stampa lui Hokusai. El însuşi era valul, lumea trecea în viteză pe lângă el, iar privirea lui nu se putea opri la nimic, totul era egal cu sine pentru că totul îi era exterior. Lumea întreagă îi părea o haină întoarsă pe dos şi rotită fără oprire în jurul trupului lui gol. Gol şi îngheţat.

The Transfiguration

To understand the world of silence, that “completely something else” in which the painter Ioan Aurel Mureșan has sunk for seven years, it is relevant to look at the last work which, like a testament, concludes the vast series of the Wonderful Hours and the Magical Travel of Duke d’Ivry. This painting remained unfinished, fact that amplifies its dramatic and inherently mysterious aura: what message is embedded there, in what has not been said forever? the cipher is forgotten, the key is lost, and the duke – the Painter tells us – is dead.

This painting is called Duke d’Ivry in Front of the Gates of Jerusalem and depicts a river of fire, an infernal stream suspended in non-finito, with countless faces-masks that are heaping carried away between the realms of this world and of the other. In the background, like an utopic freeze-frame, the mirage of the domes of the heavenly Jerusalem appear, glittering in the light of the bursts of fire, like an ultimate, yet untouchable phantasmagoric feast. In the lower left corner, almost crushed by his own characters, mounted on the donkey of humility, the spectral figure of the duke comes into view, wearing by now a Christlike mantle. The image, with its undulating line, is a last extravagance, a last painterly disappointment before the apostasy. From here on, all the rest is silence, for a complete existential cycle.

Then, when the interior fire starts again, when the gift comes down from above again and begins to voice, everything that have been undulated by the dance of the cobra, everything that has been material voluptuousness, everything that has been subliminal message, prancing, and ecstatic dreaming… everything will be transfigured into strict, rhythmic, atonal geometry, into structure, cadence, frottage, abstraction, and condensation in the open, impersonal field. The volutes have vanished, replaced by restrictive, ascetic exercises, that look for, in the flesh of the visible, the master plan, the primordial mechanism of functioning of both the image and its secondary game. The mechanism of alchemy was well known – solve et coagula. Scatter yourself and bring yourself together, but under a new banner. solve et coagula. Risipeşte-te şi adună-te din nou, dar sub un alt steag.

This was happening in 2012 and it was the omen of a new thematic cycle that would coalesce in painterly matter, in that nourishing matter that welcomed him back into her bosom like the prodigal son. And the interior void would again be filled with color, but not all the way, as the sieving filter would still be there, even if more and more evanescent, like a banner reminding him not only of the sweet, ultra-marine hours of Scheherazade’s stories, but also of the Season in Hell, and, most of all, of the abyss that drew them apart.

Beyond

Goodbye, Silk Road! Welcome road of Ultrasilvania, bordered by the water string of the Criș and the hills of Huedin. A road very precise and, at times, extremely delicate, like the blade of a warrior, like a pendulum.

(Excerpted from Ioan Aurel Mureșan, Ultrasilvania: Painting as pharmakon, critical texts: Magda Cârneci, Ramona Novicov, Cătălin Davidescu, epilogue: Sorina Jecza, Timișoara: Editura Fundației Interart Triade, 2021, pp. 98 – 102.)

On Ioan Aurel Mureșan’s Wanderings in His Natal Transylvania

Cătălin Davidescu

Among the oldest themes of universal literature, we also find that of the journey. The attempt to systematize such a vast and diverse field could be synthetized in two major registers: the exterior/material one, where the journey means curiosity, knowledge, experience and the interior/affective one, whose single attribute is the experiencing on the level of sensibility of a real or imagined path. Here, the author sets his own route to arrive at a superior self-knowledge.

The idea of approaching the Ultrasilvania series from this perspective is related to an apparently insignificant biographical detail, but one that has left its mark not only on the artist’s life, but also on his work: the frequent trips that Ioan Aurel Mureșan is making between Oradea, his hometown, and Cluj-Napoca, where he teaches at the University of Art and Design. The Transylvanian topos has generated over the years various forms of cultural adhesion, in which I am not sure whether the geography played a dominant role, or rather it was the man, the community, the way it perceived its place and assumed it with a certain joy of belonging.

If we follow the cycles that make up Ioan Aurel Mureșan’s creation, starting with A Few Considerations on the Magical Travel of Duke d’Ivry As It Was Documented by His Court Painter, Ioan Aurel Mureșan (what a Borgesian title!), despite their apparent distinctness, their pregnant stylistic but also thematic delimitation, they all share a common denominator: the “journey”. Perhaps a competent researcher of his work would decipher the avatars of the theme before and after 1989, but we can see clear how, starting with the mid ‘90s, it became outlined more firmly in the epic substance of his painterly discourse.

Ultrasilvania represents an important moment, marking the evolution of the artist on the axis of an abstract painting of a lyrical nature. The whole series, made up in a distinct artistic manner, like all the important stages of his creation, outline a form of an assumed, both aesthetically and affectively, understanding not just of a place, but more of a mood. Conceived between 2013-2014, despite favoring the non-figurative as type of image, developing on the coordinates of action abstraction, it could essentially be subsumed to the same mythology compellingly assumed by the painter: “The Ultrasilvania project reconciles the historical genre of landscape with the contemporary painting. The ultra- particle carries a semiotic overcharge – something ‘beyond’, ‘further’, in a dense and purged form.” It is more than a confession, it is a testimony designed as integral part in the exhibition of this cycle, of great relevance being, from this point of view, the title per se. By approaching such a local-cultural idiom, whose identity has almost vanished from the current artistic landscape, Ioan Aurel Mureșan affirms his option to escape the trap of a “here” and “now, which has invaded with stereotypical clichés the contemporary artistic discourse. He proposes a restauration of the status of the painter, relying on the unostentatiously manifested quality of the aesthetical element and the affective dimension. The artist has felt, perhaps, the need of a re-situation in relation to his creation from the ‘80s, deeply impregnated with visual forms characteristic to neo-expressionism, bearing a powerful protesting fingerprint. The compositions with spectral, twisted forms, remarkably intertwined with text messages embedded in the painterly surface have generated truly emblematical artworks for that historical moment. Magda Cârneci includes him in the category of the neo-expressionists that build “personal mythologies equally fabulous and grotesque”. After the moment of 1989 was consumed, feeling the uselessness of carrying on this undertaking, the painter focused his attention on his own experiences, with the same intensity as in his visual discourses from the communist period.

The vitality of the current landscapes, created with thick paste and the palette knife, follows, contrary to any appearance, a rigorous pattern, grounded on a visual language whose abstract dominant often perpetuates the landmarks, more suggested than concrete, of a figurative discourse. The suggestion of a road or a railway, beneficially dividing the painterly surface, of some trees nervously sgraffito-ed from the thickness of the matter, imposing a good dynamic to the landscape, or the series of constructions that punctuate the line of the horizon are all indications of the artist’s choice of holding something from the epic substance of the image. It is a figurative art that is more imagined than translated into practice, seeking not to identify the space, but to confer it a personality, to facilitate the recognition of the subject he sets himself to explore. Many of the artworks, conceived in a plunged perspective, contain faint figurative clues inserted in the composition, designed to order the painterly surface. The most frequent and highlighted element is nevertheless the way/the trip – whether it’s a road, a trail, a footpath or, most probably, a railway. The drawing, made with the handle of the paintbrush or the palette knife, in thickly laid paste, sets the dynamic of rhythm in which each artwork is conceived. The powerful suggestion of the gesture, backed by a chromatic palette closed to that of Transylvanian expressionists, generate the tensed effect of the composition. The dramatism of his painterly expression starts a dialogue over time with that of Țuculescu’s painting from the ’60s, both resorting to pasted surfaces, a pathetical gesture, and a chromatic violence. Nevertheless, going beyond the shell of things, we find a shared inner vibration, hard to be missed by the trained eye.

Ioan Aurel Mureșan builds his visual path like an avatar of the alterity of his own self, which grants him a privileged position in the Romanian contemporary artistic landscape.