”Ioan Aurel Mureșan, a spirit haunted by fervor, that only the consciousness of an organic equilibrium, of a consubstantiality with the primal universe, of a knowledge-identification of the self with the cosmos perceived as the sum of vital energies in constant metamorphosis, guided him along the questions of our century, has built in his practice that is spanning over almost two decades a body of work valuable per se and significant for the contemporary Romanian art. His creation could be subsumed to that moment of mutation from the history of Romanian painting, that includes the ’80s, the moment of the renewal of the visual language that also presumed the mature reflection on the purpose of the creative act. This generation came together under the sign of the rejection of the cliché, of the outworn conventional form, manifesting as a “movement of shock and opening at the same time”, in opposition also to the obsolete foundations of the content, marked concurrently by a fundamental interest in raising the visual form to a spiritual level.
The creation of Ioan Aurel Mureșan, like that of his colleagues of generation, could be correlated with a prospective function, a complete dynamism of the creative spirit, the arrival at a state of total availability. In Ioan Aurel Mureșan’s work, the phantasy, the fresh intuition, the return to the highly spiritualized motifs, to the so-called primordial plane of eternally human values, the joy of the play founded on a select knowledge of the expressive valences of color, of mastering the stroke that determines the musicality of the image, are the main characters. The originality of his universe pertains to the essence. His opening to the world through creation has always been under the beneficial auspices of a profound culture, of a vivid, nonconformist, and unaltered spirituality; in each artwork, the artist seeks to “unveil the truth”, imagining motifs or series of motifs, projections of his spiritual interests – invaluable and simultaneously lyrical in color, authentic stages of the liberation from himself. Aiming for synthesis, the painter ciphers, in a form that is perpetuating figurative innuendos, the spiritual nobility and sacrifice as premises for the creation. Via Dolorosa series reveals not only the intensity of living the idea of sacrifice, but also his vocation to master the dynamic forms, gradually purged, that obstinately call for another realm, just vaguely perceived, under the disconcerting and changing aspects of the real.
And it is not at all hard to find, in these spiritual emblems, the idea that the “Creator’s self illuminates and is illuminated” by Sacrifice. The artist innovates, searching also for a visual form able to equate with color the expansion, the inclusion, the incorporation, the unification, the identification, as processes of life and creation. For the enlightened senses, – the significances –, to reach us, the artist advances the proposal of a space-time, a visual space of synthesis where form, color, and light are engaged in an almost musical movement. The chromatic change allows the artist to perform, seemingly, a rite of mythical purification, a rite of passage from the human condition to that of a different realm, that of the Sacred. He is painting these meanings and questions with solemnity, with mastery, tinting by the stroke the chromatic surface, from complete calmness to exultation or pain. And it is not at all hard to find, in these spiritual emblems, the idea that the “Creator’s self illuminates and is illuminated” by Sacrifice. The artist innovates, searching also for a visual form able to equate with color the expansion, the inclusion, the incorporation, the unification, the identification, as processes of life and creation. For the enlightened senses, – the significances –, to reach us, the artist advances the proposal of a space-time, a visual space of synthesis where form, color, and light are engaged in an almost musical movement. The chromatic change allows the artist to perform, seemingly, a rite of mythical purification, a rite of passage from the human condition to that of a different realm, that of the Sacred. He is painting these meanings and questions with solemnity, with mastery, tinting by the stroke the chromatic surface, from complete calmness to exultation or pain.
