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CULTURAL CONFLUENCES - ROMANIAN ECHOES
The Induced Fantastic
The gallery Orizont in the heart of the capital-city recently hosted the exhibition of painter Doru Rotaru (born 1943). Here are some data mentioned in the exhibition programme: a graduate of the Nicolae Grigorescu Fine Arts Institute in Bucharest, having studied with masters Stefan Szonyi and Ion Stendl, Doru Rotaru has been (since 1969) present in almost all the official salons and state exhibitions, and has opened one-man and group shows in many countries (Poland, Bulgaria, Czecho-slovakia, GDR, FRG, Yugoslavia, Australia, Austria, China, France).
His recent one-man show contained still lives, landscapes, portraits and compositions. The common feature of the canvasses is the easiness with which the painter beautifully paints anything, with a professional skill one envies, up to a point.
The difficulties, whether encountered or induced, are solved with the assurance typical of a wellrehearsed performance. The similarity between these paintings and a performance is due to a surrealist scene-painting approache in a hyper-realistic manner. What would this induced fantastic look like, which is sought offhandedly in abundant details or in the obviously recherche mise-en-scene, without the metaphysical lesson of European painting (Magritte, Dali, Chirico, Brauner) ? Sure, it would be much more shocking.
The painter cultivates his predictible manner in a painting in which the fantastic-being too obvious and abundant-loses its intriguing quality. Everything is allowed when we get used to "the accidental meeting of an umbrella and a sowing machine on an operation table". The happening is no longer a happening. Behind it, there is the artist. Wonderment, caused by the happening, is a vehicle taking us to a world where wthing amazes us anymore. According to what has been said and written in recent decades about the fantastic, Doru Rotaru's canvasses do not belong into the imaginary collection of fantastic works initiated by Roger Caillois. Maybe this is not the artist's intention. The canvasses of Doru Rotaru contain metamorphoses interrupted in spectacular moments, well staged and well painted, with their theatrical affectation hteratism. The allgories - not only those of historical compositions - are made with a light hand unable, however, to disguise their long elaborated quality. The same pictorial dexterity, which is a potential danger, is evident in all the paintings. The load of symbols, repetitive and arborescent, comes to overwhelm the character, the latter being also the first to ignore what happens around him. The details, joyfully identified and amplified to the utmost degree, surpass in importance and attractiveness the inner life of the portrait, they become an annex, a support, a pretext for an allegory that deprives it of its life. A hieratic, far-offish attitude, a glimpse cast from beyond time dehumanizes them, contrasting with the inquisitive look of the spectator.
Feminine portraits have eyes accustomed to the eternity, not to looking at other human beings. Nobody smiles in the portraits of Doru Rotaru. The characters have a grave manner, keen on a meaning only they know. They are, in the scenic economy of the canvas, symbols merely recorded, having neither a past, nor a future. The characters' hands tell more than their glance. They have the same delicate, pianist-like fingers. There is something sacred, mysterious and aggressive that pervades the still lives and landscapes of Doru Rotaru. Light partakes of the successful rendering of impending tension, or of just-eluded strain. Here, more than in the portraits, what is natural looks more visibly like an ignored aim. In the onlooker's memory, the ephemeral character typical of some humble objects polished by a teardrop, lasts much more than the ambition of the stage-managed symbol. The danger of the mise-en-scene is rather blurred in the landscapes, which assimilate more naturally the spectacular fantastic.
Maybe one's road to oneself, in the case of Doru Rotaru, should avoid the excess of induced fantastic, opting for the silent, understood implications of discretion.
Adrian Mitiş - Revista LUMEA din 30 Iunie 1989
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