The family

Hardly ever Ioan Aurel Mureșan lets the image he carries inside come out, the image of the family in which he grew up and lives. And yet it is there, very solidly anchored. A more stressed accent the artist puts now and then brings back his father Mihai, and the richness of his palette was undoubtedly a gift from his mother, Eugenia. Behind the many masks he keeps hiding himself under, hardly ever the painter lets someone see the warmth with which he holds his family dear – Măriuca, who has been his companion for a lifetime, Paul, the son left so far away, Teo, the “treasure”, now a fully grown-up man.

Sometimes, on the surface of the canvas, a thought crystallizes, an emotion transpires. . . he then recognizes, in the mirror of the painting, the world he is carrying inside, silenced. This is what happened when he chose to paint Christina’s world, in which he placed the burning roof he had seen from above, from the road of the German, when he had arrived home, at Ceaun, and likewise, he recognized in the white figure that was running carrying its elongated shadow on the back, Eugenia’s walk, captured in a more recent work.

EUGENIA MUREȘAN

The mother Eugenia remains the tutelary figure of the family. She knew from the very beginning that Nelu, her oldest son, would become an artist. She believed in him, even if she didn’t show it. Yet she had little to say about the standing he had reached, and not without some irony. The sharp word was also what she used to redress the course. She spent her life making her duty and, in the end, she took the time and liberty to answer her call: she started to paint. Impetuously, waves of color were pouring out, vivid torrents, birds and flowers, peacocks with rounded tails, and dragons were sitting in the frame of her world, outlining a magic universe ruled, alternatively, by the Virgin Mary and herself. When asked, she would look at the Virgin and say: She’s fine, the Virgin Mary. Looks like me. And she was, undoubtedly, right.

Eugenia’s paintings are windows on the miraculous. A geography whose landmarks are drawn in the blood-red color of the heart.

Most often, in her paintings you see glittering the magnificent beauty of the peacocks: the shy peahens, with their feathers together, stepping carefully over a flowering branch and the mighty peacocks, displaying their large, lavishly adorned train, up to the roof, so it can encompass the sky. . . These birds do not belong to the current order of the making of the world, like the other creatures that populate the yard around the house – cocks and horses, spotted cows, the two dogs, Pif and Codatu; the peacocks take over all the space of the painting, projected in the mirage of the absolute: the colors pouring from the artist’s brush seem to descend from Far Eastern cultures, that can only be reached by the mind, or from inner fantasies. The artist projects herself in the peacocks, their proud posture is her surrogate. She paints them in tens of ways, satisfied at the end just to put her name in a corner, in magnificent calligraphy: Eugenia.

Undeniably, the self-assured artistic instinct, practiced by all the generations of creators that anonymously preceded the artist, the fervor of the painting, and the energy of the stroke have been passed on up to the ultimate painter, Ioan Aurel Mureșan. Eugenia’s figure unravels, discretely, in one of the canvases from the series Variations from the Quinta del Sordo, painted by a spirit disquieted by the uneasiness of the final journey.

The family

EUGENIA MUREȘAN

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