Sibiu, Piata Mare Painting

This is an urban landscape with Piata Mare in Sibiu, Romania. An oil on canvas painting made in 2014. Literature: Emil Nicolae, "Dumitru D. Bostan-The place and the Journey", Piatra-Neamt, 2014, p. 89, illustrated. An art book with 105 illustrations of the original artworks. Exhibited: “Nemteni la Bruckenthal”, group exhibition, 30 artworks, Bruckenthal Museum, Sibiu, 2014. Testimony of a lyrical sensitiveness, but lacking a clear individuality, in as far as thematic, manner and style, and even atmosphere are concerned, the creation of Dumitru Bostan seems to follow in the tradition of the inter-war Romanian watercolour. The figurative is the constant of his paintings, too, and his landscapes (especially his cityscapes) give the true measure of his creation. There is something of Tonitza in his works (that diffuse melancholly) or of the cityscapes of Petraşcu or Vasile Popescu (unexpected cutting of motifs, the free, and surprisingly harmonious use of colours, with a bias for the fauve chromatic), of Ştefan Dimitrescu (with his sad light) or of Francisc Şirato (allusive transparencies and crecious colours), that oozes from the creations of Dumitru Bostan, whereas, in his more recent creations there is a touch of melancholly coming from Utrillo’s representations of Montmartre. Clearly arranged compositions, where the shapes are well defined by the intervention of the line on which the colour is spread in a well ballanced manner, with an obvious bias for blue, but with frequent interventions of the hot colours of a summer day. Thus, his landscapes, in which we recognize the motifs he loved most, (the streets and the yards of Piatra Neamt, the Verdun Boulevard from Biarritz, the houses, bridges and the squares of Venice, the Isle of Murano and then the narrow streets of Sibiu or the Liars’ Bridge in Sibiu), breathe a melancholly meditation enhanced by a the lack of human presence. The suggestions are delicate, insinuating, coming from the artist’s discreet confessions, who prefers to filter his emotions through watercolour, a technique of light and transparencies where strong contrasts don’t fit in. In the painting The Liars’ Bridge, donated to the museum by the artist, we recognize his bias for concise compositions, ballanced and with a modest paraphernalia, with carefully and subtly harmonized chromatic, the element which identyfies the artist and which converts the message from a cerebral message into an emotional one. Iulia Mesea Brukenthal. Acta Musei, IX. 2, 2014