Obidience and extasy Print

A graduate of the George Enescu Academy of Arts in Iaşi, Romania, visual artist Cezar Ungureanu, active in neo-surrealist and re-constructivist painting, has also developed his artistic skills in the fresco and tempera techniques specific to monumental and mural painting, attending postgraduate courses organised by the Romanian Patriarchy; Religious Painting Committee. The artist has already produced works in several churches in Romania and abroad, as well as a large number of oil and acrylic painting, and neo-Byzantine style religious paintings using the fresco technique, in tempera and acrylic paint. In his dissociative reconstructivist works, the artist combines the vitality of deconstructivism with the comfort and rewards of classicism, with the aim of finding a feeling of reality in an illusory world, and of producing works filled with emotion, meaning and authentic visual language. Traditionalist in some respects and subversive in others, the artist's work revives the lost pleasures of classical art; it carries, on the one hand, the tension produced by the deconstructivist influence, and on the other hand the consonance of a classical structure, using interferences, fusions, juxtapositions of images, trompe l'oeil, pseudo-Euclidian spaces and so on. The artist's pieces have depth, intensity, and a well justified "artificial" realism. By recomposing a "new reality" in perpetual transformation and by creating new mobile and self- explanatory contextures, the artist continues the leitmotif of antagonism and bipolarity specific to neo- realist artwork and to dissociative reconstructivist pieces, sometimes using backdrops, scenery and metallised insertions influenced by Byzantine painting and by the works of Gustav Klimt, who in his turn was captivated by the maniera greca paintings in Verona. Some of the works are painted entirely by hand, while others combine painting with the appropriationist manipulation of images through pigment transfer, and with stencil art. "The fruit of a fertile imaginative disposition, the works of artist Cezar Ungureanu reveal a certain surprising depth towards the sphere of mysterious revelations that assert themselves as the effect of the subconscious, sensitised and guided towards unsettling reveries, a realm of serenity, of equilibrium, a medium that gives itself off, generously, to dreaming.