RADU OREIAN

by Diana Marincu

The entirety of Western thought and history of ideas have been built on repudiating the body, flesh, and the affect from the main cognitive activities which deal with processing and rationalizing the world. Only relatively recently dismantled, this long “tradition” led to the segregation of experiences which lead us to knowledge. The restoration of the body-thought-metaphor triad is due to certain studies like “Philosophy of the flesh”, where the authors – George Lakoff and Mark Johnson – argue the emotional involvement of reason, as it is both metaphorical and imaginative. The dichotomies upon which the human subject has been built up over centuries – mind-body, passion-reason, psychology-biology, reality-appearance, depth-surface – are more and more controversial in today’s world, as they are being replaced with new theories concerning the integration of bodily experiences, and of conceptual models made flesh in visual, kinetic, neural systems.   

As a working premise, this ascertainment that humanity does not possess reason in the absence of the body or it does not exist as an immaterial mind, has made thinking and passion fuse into a fluid structure of instruments of knowledge which are much more nuanced and more “engaged” in empiricism. 

The visual creation of artist Radu Oreian have long since intuited this remarkable turn of events, and have instated notions such as the flesh, the body, the sensuality of the skin, among some of the most truthful instruments for measuring the pulse of humanity at a collective level, like a pictorial membrane stretching over an eclectic “moral geography”. The relationship between painting and the body has long been the subject of research, and this text will attempt to tackle it through two theoretical pathways – the production of the visible as a metaphysics of the flesh (from Merleau-Ponty to Lakoff, Elizabeth Grosz and others), and painting as alchemy (James Elkins). Between these coordinates, Radu Oreian’s paintings and drawings allow themselves to be deciphered within “haptic” stimulations of visual perception, which the artist uses with considerable subtlety and refinement.

Radu Oreian’s paintings are located within this stage of haptic perception, as it was defined by Alois Riegl, the well-known art historian of the Viennese art school. The paintings which belong in this category defy any context in which they may be placed, they attract like a magnet, and they unveil themselves like a landscape, at least at the level of volumetric perception and materiality. Paintings like Death at Saint-Jean, Côte Bleue or Frioul are proofs of chromatic and mnemonic quests through which the present is deciphered as a solid embodiment of sensations of the sensorial and visible world. These map-paintings, in which the invocation of certain existing places is perhaps no mere accident, create a telescopic game which brings us close to even the most profound textures of a territory, until we feel its scent and consistency, its landscape and its shimmer. It is not by chance that some of the artist’s sources of inspiration arrive by way of Indian, Persian, European Middle-Age miniatures, as well as Etruscan frescoes or Roman mosaics. These visual reference points create a poetic space for existential questioning, which miniatures formulate not only via the realism of figurative details, but most of all through their decorativeness, and through the abstractions of the frames which embrace these scenes, which are no less relevant, alongside the elaborate calligraphy. The frontispieces or the illuminations of these miniatures also distill something of the expression of Gothic art, and of the stained-glass windows so prevalent at that time. The lessons imparted by the Persian calligraphers remain exemplary, and the shimmer of colors in European incunabula represents a model of chromatic refinement. Radu Oreian’s paintings and drawings are sometimes inspired by these typographical models, by the history of culture and civilization in search of visual ways of expression. The golden sheen in his painstaking drawings brings a touch of euphuism and sophistication to the palimpsest-type compositions assembled by Oreian. Even the archaism of these expressions may be associated with the artist’s searches, which are not limited to appropriating certain aesthetic motifs, reaching instead the level of a pictorial “filigree” of a thought process, the transposition into the work of gestures which follow the threads of knowledge via tactile interaction with a surface, via the modeling of matter, and the corporeal nature of perception.

When the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty became preoccupied by the body and flesh as philosophical notions apt to define a new typology of being, which is neither matter, nor mind, nor substance, he capitalized a new category of belonging, a horizon common to every form of being, a unifying texture for the entire phylum of present visibility. This is where the process of perception takes place, and the body takes possession of reality by seeing and being seen. The interweaving of the visible and the invisible makes us capable of distinguishing between presence and absence, and of defining our own manifestations as separate from other things, as textures of differences and filiations. These reflections, never finalized by Merleau-Ponty at the time of his death, help us better understand, perhaps, that which cannot be conceptualized, except by calling upon the body as a medium of communication and production of the visible. Thus, the Cartesian dichotomy between body and soul is overcome, and the body is considered a matrix of the entire existing space. In the painting Study for Goosebumps II, 2019, the textural surface of the work is given the substance of human skin, having been stimulated by touch, having a pilomotor reaction to strong emotions or external sensations. The metaphor of the painting’s embodiment continues in the Molecular Map works, which pulsate under the layered strata of pictorial paste. The epidermic “maps” constructed by Radu Oreian have been ongoing, ever since the edifyingly titled exhibition The Galvanic Skin Arousal, 2017, in which curator Jane Newal brought to the forefront of discussion the absolute master of painting the human body, Titian, as well as Francis Bacon, he who was so fascinated by the voluptuousness of raw flesh. The artist’s “vectorial studies” create an analogy between cells, membrane and epidermis, and the digital networks of the computational system we are engaged with every day. The informational universe of endless networks and uncountable archives is mirrored in the detailed and repetitive explorations of forms drawn or painted by Radu Oreian. 

Much has been written on the physiological effects of colors on people, and Goethe laid the foundations of modern psychology of colors by associating emotional experience with the subjective perception of colors. Now, looking back on the entire history of the psychology of colors, we realize that the most important aspect of these reflections is related first and foremost to the belief that the three planes of existence – emotional, mental, and physical – are affected by chromatic perception. The fascinating painting, Retinal Vertigo, 2021, focuses on one detail of the bright red sky inspired by Edvard Munch’s work, where polar stratospheric clouds appear iridescent, as though set on fire, influencing onlookers’ moods directly. This nature unleashed draws us into a volcanic vertigo of sensations and feelings which create the very dynamic effect of absorption into a colorful abyss. Part of the Limone, limone exhibition at Eduardo Secci Contemporary in Milan, this diminutively sized painting is joined by works such as Gothic tornado II, 2021, Farewell to the Thinker of Thoughts IV, 2020, and the work which provides the exhibition’s name, Limone limone, 2021. This latter work starts from the observation of the process of degradation of lemons, transforming the organic alteration into a network of lines which depend on each other. Gothic tornado II seems related to the afore-mentioned reddish vertigo, however it expands the same volcanic, unleashed atmosphere in a simultaneously figurative and non-figurative direction. The feline symbols which watch over the collection on the top side seem to be extracted from the miniature decorations which “frame” the central scenes. Here, it seems as though the edges of the composition become more important than the center, because it is there, at the edges, between the liquefied rosettes, doubled eyes and camouflaged figs, that the metaphysical truth may be found. The German art historian Wilhelm Worringer presented a very pertinent and original consideration, namely that Gothic draperies are a form of abstractionism, “sealing” the painting from the rest of the world, cropping the pictorial image as an “autonomous organism”. Within the same exhibition, the series of ceramic pieces Turning Gothic, 2021, comprises an ample repertoire of monochrome forms which are textured in various ways, which “escape” the pictorial space and reclaim a three-dimensional space. 

The previous exhibition, in Florence, curated by the same Pier Paolo Pancotto, assembles several magnetic paintings, such as Red gone bad, Death at Saint-Jean, Frioul or Collective Portrait II, all from 2020. This is where another possible pathway for deciphering comes into play, which I believe highlights a valiant approach of painting as a magical and alchemical medium for the transformation of matter. When the American art historian James Elkins dives into an analogy between painting and alchemy, he does so by following several similarities: painting and alchemy both engage in a permanent negotiation between water and stone, between liquid and solid. As Elkins writes, “the means are liquid, the results are solid”, while the process of transmutation from one to the other is paramount. A second analogy observed by Elkins relates to those people who avoid painting, and stay well away from the laboratory, those which prefer reflecting upon these processes rather than undertaking them, namely the art critics, and the spiritual alchemists. The material traces of the painter’s struggle with matter usually go unrecognized, but the texture of the painting always preserves an amalgam of memories of brush strokes upon the canvas, of the resistance presented by the paste, or the vigor intrinsic to mixing color. The question raised by Elkins – What is thinking within the painting, as opposed to thinking about the painting? – is beginning to preoccupy an increasing number of theoreticians, in the attempt to discover what the paste itself has to say, beyond the subject, narrative, and representation. And this is where Elkins believes that alchemy can come to our aid, as a science of substances and processes. The Philosopher Stone is the sign of a perfect mind and of the soul in a state of transcendence. “Paint is a cast made of the painter’s movements, a portrait of the painter’s body and thoughts.” Thus, paint is the painter’s liquid thought, transmuted into matter, through the “blind” experimentation of trial, of intuition. The “crystallized people” which Goethe recounted in the poem Faust are, on a metaphorical level, these more or less accidental embodiments, for which there is no recipe. No masterpiece in the history of painting can be “reproduced”, completely explained, and dissected. There is always an irreducible core, which brings it closer to that mystery of the alchemical process. All this being considered, how can we position ourselves in regard to the painting within Radu Oreian’s paintings? The layers of deposited pictural paste sometimes resemble ground stone, or crust-like residue, which accrues and conceals pulsations on a more profound level of organic substance. The painting’s “skin” is never smooth. In the above-mentioned paintings, each volute of the paste contributes to the repetitive, almost hypnotic gestures through which that state of expanded consciousness necessary to depart reality is achieved.

Structured like an infinite puzzle, Oreian’s paintings contain yet another fantastic intuition. Besides the fact that they solidify those thoughts which are captured in a state of flux, liquid and ephemeral, they invoke the idea of the monstrous as an expression of human-non-human hybridization, an intersection between decorative ornament and figurative representation. This hybrid is “borrowed” from 16th Century art, in which defying the laws of proportion and of spatial ambiguity leads to a “continual savage genesis”, according to the authors of the book „Ornament and Monstrosity in Early Modern Art”, Chris Askholt Hammeken and Maria Fabricius Hansen. Thus, we return to the idea of the frame, of the “parergon” which doesn’t function as an addition to the central composition, but rather as a “prerequisite of the ergon”, according to Kantian terminology and Derrida’s reinterpretation. The deconstruction of the real, as an artist’s strategy to transform a perception or a fantasy into images, is a way of engaging with the monstrous, that mixture of incompatible elements. In the film Rouge, le portrait mensonger de Bertrand Bonello, we are dealing with a director, Bertrand (Bertrand Bonello), who searches for the embodiment of the monstrous in a painting, calling on art historians to guide him. At a certain point, one of the experts who accompany him says: “The painting itself is a monster.” The painting becomes a character of the film, assuming the vantage point of the camera and viewing its viewers. And the most interesting aspect of this strange relationship which is established with the pictorial force is that, as he is rummaging for the inspiration of the monstrous, the director develops a red eczema on his skin, which spreads like a map of an unknown territory, with which he tries to cohabit. The painting which closes the film, Self-portrait in front of a mirror (1908), by Léon Spilliaert, uses the mirror as a deathly omen. The character in the painting regards himself, but also his viewers, and arrogantly reclaims his immortality. It is an affirmation of the autonomy of painting. Paintings gaze at us just as we gaze at them. Similarly, the painting Red gone bad, 2020, can be a ferment which alters “red”, which contributes to that passing from one state to another, precisely at the moment of becoming something “other”. Just as the film “Rouge” traces the idea of transforming appearances, Oreian’s paintings defy existing categories of artistic reception. 

In the exhibition A sea of green and blue, at the 1969 Gallery, the artist reinterprets a painting by Bruegel by transforming the landscape into an “electric” network of colors and lines (the painting titled The Return, 2022). Other paintings which continue to outline this universe of subterranean circuits, like a capillary network, are Burning Metropolis II, 2022, or Thinker of Thoughts III, 2022. Both paintings play around with the idea of a fictional archeology, a “relational geography”, and that which Irit Roggof called situated knowledge – “a series of direct relationships between subjects, places and epistemologies”, a spontaneous, temporary, and fluid knowledge. 

The most ambitious, large-scale paintings represent a distinct chapter which brings Oreian’s undertakings close to the monumentality of Roman frescoes. The Last Agora, from 2019, a painting five meters in width, was part of the exhibition Microscripts and Melted Matters, at the Nosco Gallery in London, as well as a presentation which took place at the Plan B Foundation in Cluj-Napoca, as a stand-alone piece. Having a significant impact, this work imagines a final gathering of the Athenian people, in which individualities are no longer distinct, creating an amorphous mass of bodies which “saturate” the public space. Bringing into the present one of the most well-known methods of structuring a functional civic life, the artist reflects on the idea of collectivity and on the dynamics of masses of people, maybe even contemporary manipulation. The theme of collectivity is also present in the work titled Collective Portrait under a Palm Tree, 2016, where humanity, collective memory, group dynamics, congestion, and density reveal the delicate connections between politics, geography, history, and language. An exotic and different reality which is difficult to map. 

Radu Oreian integrates his personal and collective experiences into his art, the experiences which brought him to this point, and he populates every fiber of his artistic thought with motifs extracted from the history of arts and from humanity’s cultural tradition. This is why we very often have the feeling of gazing upon a palimpsest of knowledge, a “palazzo enciclopedico”, with an extremely personal taxonomy, which – once deciphered – can supply that necessary existential model in which the body and the intellect intermingle to the point of blending.