Caryatides Print

Composition-painting; acrylic, oil paint, appropriationism – image manipulation through dyestuff transfer, shiny and tarnished metallised paint, grunge A dynamic composition, with a great mythological charge, with allusive iconic elements reminiscent of the human-form columns in the architecture of Greek temple, of the vegetal transformation of the maiden Carya, of Artemis's nymphs and of the dance of the maidens of Caryai - Laconia. The Apple of Discord, offered by Paris to Aphrodite, and by Eve to Adam, the versatile Erys taking the shape of a snake, lends the work additional connotations and mythological consonances. The recontextualised figure of the central character is reminiscent of the hieratic figures in Byzantine monumental art. Occasionally cloaked in an apparent aura of neo-surrealism, Cezar Ungureanu's DISSOCIATIVE RE-CONSTRUCTIVISM proposes a perpetual, eclectic, syncretic reconceptualization; a permanent and arrhythmic decontextualization-recontextualization; bipolarities such as utopian/dystopian, ancient/avant-garde, formal/conceptual etc., recomposed on a classical structure, a distinctive characteristic of re-constructivism, with a nod to artifice, sometimes creating moments of genuine emotion and authentic meaning – an artificial reconstruction of a deconstructivist-illusory world with iconic elements transcontextualized in the atemporal. The artist's DISSOCIATIVE RE-CONSTRUCTIVIST works are essentially reconstructions, re-composed using decontexualized elements from very diverse sources. These intrusions are often deliberately exaggerated; iconic and/or archetypal elements inserted consciously, sometimes creating the idea of polydimensional scans and of antimonies of artistic and aesthetic language; this type of reconstructivism has been very little experimented with, especially in visual arts, and then only sporadically or accidentally. Similar to deconstructivist fiction, Cezar Ungureanu's re-constructivist art is explicitly aware of its own status as a creation, illusion or fiction, engendering a dialogue between the viewer and the artwork, in a language that does not need to be learned; the iconic elements that raise in a way to the status of contemporary religion using classical art pictorial resources, sometimes referring directly to a previous, real or invented, piece, which, in its turn, may have been based on an earlier piece; thus, it has to depict genuine emotions or to inspire a sui generis emotional response. The ideatic approach of re-constructivism, the combination of archaic elements and modern ones, the antithesis between the classic visual language and the postmodern one, the digital and the pictorial, the conceptual and the formal, in a unitary ensemble, with a range of diverse compositional elements, from cave art to ultramodern – deconstructivist elements, grunge insertions, intrusions, juxtapositions and fusions of elements – antigravity, atemporality and pluridimensional effects, allow the artist to obtain an effect of outstanding harmony, integrity and agility in the resolution of composition, lending to the treatment of each topic an added emotional and visual charge. Another challenge posed by the artist resides in the tension produced by the influence of deconstructivist elements adapted in order to observe a classical structure, despite the inclusion of surprising elements, creating together a conventional whole – genuine installations of canvas, sometimes resorting to a controlled Dadaism, to an ideatic and artistic reassembly – a deliberate reconstruction of reality in search of a feeling of Reality in an illusory world. The works force the viewer to believe in one's own, more profound reality, despite acknowledging its superficial artificiality. The work is made on canvas and mounted on a stretcher; it can be exhibited as such or it can be framed.