ARTICULATED SILENCES reflects the artist’s vision of painting “as a trans-substantial reality, deeply imprinted in the human mind…” and proposes distancing from what, generically, can be perceived as Minimalism. Marcel Bunea’s art does not intend to “excite”… in the primitive way, but to determine us to think about what surrounds us and what is inside us, in the depths of our consciousness. The artist defines his approach as follows: “Trans-substantialism designates my constant and obsessive concern for spiritual order… By spiritual order I do not necessarily mean dogmatic representation or the classic retinal pleasure.”
Cătălin Davidescu, curator of the exhibition, together with Ruxandra Demetrescu, considers: ‘ “Articulated silences ”is an exemplary discourse on the effort towards perfection and on the mature age reached by Marcel Bunea’s art, being intentionally conceived in contrast with current heterodox tendencies, which he tries to establish a globalizing vision at the level of visual language, but especially of the theoretical approach. The artist has now reached a moment of revealing his aesthetic conclusions, the result of more than two decades of research, materialized in an impressive number of works and exhibition events, as a result of which he managed to confirm or restructure, as the case may be, part of the whole of a large and at the same time, risky visual project through the elitism that it deliberately implies. From his stormy debut with the cycle of the ” Nefârtaţilor ” to the current geometric shapes, despite an apparent stylistic discrepancy, there is a coherence of his artistic thinking, which has gone through several forms of visual expression, to understand itself and, last but not least, in order to be able to relate permanently to a moving phenomenon, such as contemporary art.’
Extending this perspective, Ruxandra Demetrescu strongly emphasized: ‘Convinced that” painting is a profound articulated silence “, he opted for non-objective language as a privileged way to deepen the means and meanings of painting, in an alternative that rethinks, finds and now capitalizes – at the end of the second decade of the 21st century – the possibilities of abstract art, which dominated the last century, and is often regarded as the greatest invention of modernism. […] The aspiration towards the purity of abstraction can be seen in recent years in all the works of Marcel Bunea; it represents the expression of a painfully earned freedom, which can be defined as definitive liberation from any mimetic constraint. For the renunciation of the figurative support allows, above all, the concentration on the essential means of painting: the drawing, the proximate genre and the color, the specific difference. The viewer is no longer invited to “enter” the illusory three-dimensional space of the painting, but to remain “hanging” by the relentless, imperious and opaque surface of the uniform color layer, built in contrasting chromatic sequences. Marcel Bunea’s recent approach can be defined as rigor (conceptual) and mastery (understood as the excellence of the pictorial craft). […] “.
Marcel Bunea (b. 1952)
He graduated from the “Nicolae Grigorescu” Institute of Fine Arts, Faculty of Decorative Arts (1982), and is currently Director of the Department of Fine Arts at the National University of Arts in Bucharest. Since 1990, he has been a member of the Visual Artists’ Union of Romania, becoming Vice President of the Bucharest Painting Branch (2008–2012), and is currently a Member of the Board of Directors of the Painting Branch of the Visual Artists’ Union of Romania. With an impressive exhibition record, Marcel Bunea has enjoyed over time the attention and interest of some leading personalities of art criticism in Romania, being rewarded with important awards and distinctions, including: Prize for painting at the Art Institutes Festival (1981), the Prize for the section “Active and interactive space (Installation)” within the Bucharest Art Salon (1998) or the Order of Cultural Merit in the rank of Officer granted by the Romanian Presidency (2004).
