Petru Rusu Great Britain

For what I know now, in Petru Rusu’s painting the imaginary seems to develop with an accent of visionary expressionism rather dramatic, arousing, excited. This particular artistic attitude tests the reality through the upcoming of a symbolic-oneiric awareness and in a sharpening that could even change into a scream. It is a painting of profound, psychic investigation. A violent confession of anguish. Rusu’s is crowded by presences, which bring dramatically back the reality to a truth of archetypes, that the artist put in contrast with the leveling of the daily horizon. IN THIS engraving work, this visionary attitude is more accentuated by a narrative easing. It loosens the dramatic tension. It gains the pleasure of a pure dreaming-about. It becomes lighter, ironic, motioning. The plot moves towards dimensions of pure imagination, as it happens in the exercises of a machine that belongs to the world of fantasy. THE CHARACTERS come alive in a metamorphic dimension. They cross each other into fantastic spaces. They are free from every logic, apart from the one based on the necessity of their narrative plot. The same narrative plot that Rusu’s fantasy has developed in a game of possible analogies with the text. Rusu’s figurative tales are not descriptive. They are only in connection with the text for a pure, fantastic solicitation that the artist renews time after time. The text is a sort of pretest to stimulate his own taste, his own genius for a narrative plot derived from his pure, fantastic, visionary world, in witch emerges symbolic presences, archetypal and mysterious.

Enrico Crispolti, Pd.D, Art Critic, Professor to Art Academy Rom Italy