On interval

To delve deeper into the symbolic inventory and visual meanders of Radu Șerban’s exhibition Interval, a few key words are needed to guide the exploration. These are provided by the artist himself: passage, connection between something and something else, suspended time, reality/suggestion – interiority… The idea of the interval is not a simple matter: philosophers, aesthetes, and thinkers of all stripes have probed its potential and recited its refrain, but most have agreed that it designates the space of difference between entities or concepts, understood not as a mere absence, but as a dynamic relationship that makes alterity, becoming, and interpretation possible. That is, precisely how the artist himself defines the coordinates of his “Interval”.

The current exhibition explores precisely this intermediate space, that moment of provisional waiting, that is, the ephemeral and multidimensional nature of transition – the place between events, states or experiences. A retreat from the daily flow of information and communication, an intermezzo of introspection and silence, of anticipation or transformation; in other words, a deliberate pause, a space of contemplation in which the boundaries between real and imaginary, past and future, individual and collective become fluid.

And so, Heraclitus' famous expression panta rhei [everything flows] comes to mind. Through this, the thinker emphasizes the unity of opposites in this process of passage, suggesting that the interval is not merely a separation but a dynamic connection. For other philosophers, too, the interval is a field for reflection on time and flow. And this is where Heidegger comes in with his considerations about "Dasein" ["being there" or "existence"], that is, temporality as an in-between space – between birth and death, between authentic and inauthentic, as a moment of possibility. Or, in Derrida's flamboyant thinking, the interval seen as “différance”, something that is not immediately present, but which implies both difference and deferral, which becomes a place of ambiguity and suspension between meanings.

This referential loop among several philosophical statements is not due to any intellectual coquetry, but is meant to provide some (among many other possible) conceptual frameworks for Radu Șerban's exhibition. A useful operation, since the key to reading the themes proposed by the artist – passages, gates, the wheel of time, silence and between weaves, reflected in the titles of some of his series of works – can be given by these sophisticated considerations about interval of these thinkers, as well as by the broad and stratified baggage of universal symbolism.

For example, in "Archaeology of a Passage. The Gate ..." the artist appeals to the universal symbol of the gate as an element of passage from one realm to another, whether physical, spiritual or metaphysical. But for the artist this is a gate more as a visual metaphor, as it is barely suggested by verticals (and sometimes diagonals) that refer to the slatted structure of a wooden gate through which the gaze can barely pass, filtered by the vibrating interplay between the material and the immaterial, between the dark (worldly) foreground and the distant plane bathed in pastel lights (of the “beyond”). The series “The Wheel of Time” – a title that receives a suggestive subtitle for each work – has an emblematic presence, as it takes up the symbol of the Christian wheel (the eight-spoked wheel), a simple geometry, scratched into the painted surface like ancient sgraffitos, suggesting the flow, the cycles of life and (as such) spiritual rebirth. The series “The Silence of Simple Things” speaks in a minimal(ist), subtle vocabulary about silence as an interval, a moment of respite, of waiting or introspection dedicated to the ephemeral and a sacralized everyday life. “Thoughts between weaves” is a series of works about weaving, understood both as an act of quiet, repetitive work in the textile field, but also as a secretive arrangement, as a subjective way of constructing meaning from apparently small things.

Then, we find themes from the natural world – a true statement of artistic strategy that connects the landscape painting tradition with the post-humanism of today's world, both of them emphasizing the de-centering of the human subject and the focus on the “status naturalis”, that condition of the humans before the formation of society: “Close and Far Away”, “Vibration of Nature”, “TopoGraphies”, “Florilegium”, “Mysteries of the Garden”. They represent the interval between us and the world, between the artificiality of our dwelling and the nature beyond us. But they represent also a moment of temporary suspension of the program, of our time occupied by the everyday, reflected in works of great optical sensibility, rendered in large circular surfaces or chromatic fields with transparencies and colored sevas.

Radu Șerban's art has oscillated over the years between abstract, even spiritualist allusions at a certain point and a figurative painting with neo-expressionist attributes, the artist not embracing exclusively any of these options. Even this double option – marked by searches and explorations, charges and discharges in the symbolic order – explains Radu Șerban's art as an act, as an expression of the interval. This time, Radu Șerban remains rather in the realm of the abstract, or, rather, of the quasi-abstract, a world in which the objectual references, textures and surrounding elements are vaguely formulated, leaving room for visual exercises of great subtlety and visual depth, where the layers of color seem imponderable, conveniently contaminating each other, a process to which the soft, airy, intuitively balanced tones contribute to a large extent. A painting that doesn’t impose a narrative, that doesn’t tell stories, but which rather remains significantly, fluidly and vibrantly silent about things and us and everything situated in the interval between them.

Horea Avram

At he time of change in Romania’s political paradigm in the end of year 1989, Radu Şerban was preoccupated in the direction of a painting that explored the means of expressing a spirituality foreign to the official art, one referring to the pictorial structures of wall painting religious art in Bucovina, in the technique of egg tempera, typical for icons on wood.

The following years lead to the maturing of these means and the approach of a direction interfluent up to a point with the neo-orthodox expression trend that became noted in Bucharest during the 90s. Radu Şerban nevertheless maintained a certain distance against this trend by turning to a non-manifest figurativeness rather expressed through formal allusions than through an artistic epiphany of a religious inventory of themes. In the same time, the new social and political conditions after 1989 allowed him access to cultural areas fundamental to his artistic development, such as his research stays in Italy (1995) and Spain (1996), or his long Canadian sojourn (1997-2000).

Gradually, the human figure lost in corporeal consistency, the artist bringing into play contaminations with the icons created in Nicula and naive art, incorporating an ingenuity that brings his characters closer to the candor in children’s drawings. They do not remain isolated in this component because the human figure is associated to other elements that incorporate it in rustic universes or populate various spaces associated to previous themes (Byzantium), abandoning two-dimensional surfaces and invading the territory of objects in space, on the surfaces of which they relate to largely plastic components.

No matter the cycles to which they can be associated (The Woman, Imagined Portraits), his human figures gradually acquire a second-degree role, both as meaning and in importance in the visual field, in favor of the surface’s general composition that aims increasingly at revealing a discourse of shapes and colors holding plastic value in themselves.

Therefore, in his last cycles of works (The Patina of the Wall, Invented Landscapes), the human figure gradually evaporates or simply disappears, making way for a visual spectacle whose aim can even be that of integrating the human being in an existential amalgam that leads, eventually, to its actual disappearance.

The disappearance of the human figure from the telluric coordinates coincides with the artist’s approach of a new theme – Unidentified Characters – through the means of digital photography techniques and computer animation.
This spiritual dimension is nevertheless rather signaled by the certainty of a presence, of a double, of an immaterial „stalker” that the physical light of the projector ideatically supports, than by a relation mainly instituted through one’s adherence to a set of religious practices.

The dynamics of his personal schedule, apparently marked by the motto ''ora et labora'', his attentive and reflexive nature, his plus of intelligence, creativity and surprising originality with each new exhibition made Radu Şerban an artist from whom we can expect the revelation through art of still hidden meanings of our human experience.

Artistic Evanescences

Text published in the exhibition catalogue “Reverberations”, Museum of Comparative Art, Sângeorz-Băi, 2012

Radu Șerban is an artist for whom painting must evoke the meditative atmosphere of a bell that sanctifies the air of a day with its sound—elevating through silence, through inner stillness, and through the stylized discretion of forms—offering reconciliation with oneself and with the restless nature of the human spirit. In the comparative space of the Museum of Comparative Art in Sângeorz-Băi, his works generate surprising inner dialogues between the static sanctity of tradition and the ever-shifting effervescence of contemporary art. The conversation of the soul with matter seems to be an artistic aim in which the relic of the past is transfigured with reverence into the universe of creation. The decontextualized object, extracted from its real-world surroundings, is reprojected into installations and pictorial surfaces that reinterpret its meaning.

Artistic energy regenerates matter and restores its significance through a continuous intensification of emotion, within the new intellectual faith of the third millennium. The feeling of a supernatural encounter is triggered through the metaphysical sensibilities of painting, and traditional religiosity becomes a sacrality of art. The perspectival purity of white reveals, beneath the transparency of artistic chromatics, innocence—and above all, the opportunity for fusion between the sacred and the profane under the generous auspices of painting. Simplicity becomes a perfected sufficiency, materialized through surfaces that evoke the sensation of open, infinite spaces. The impression of black-and-white painting lays down an inevitable sfumato that mediates between the natural and the abstract, between the real world (diverse, colorful) and a surrealism reflected within the human spirit.

Color, evoked through transparencies, humanizes the cold and distant field of the purified, atemporal world. Each drop of color energizes the compositions and humanizes the transfigured faces. Each layering of immaculate white purifies, simplifies, and transfigures human nature. In this way, the merging of the profane human being with the supreme force of the universe is revealed through the artistic metaphysics of creation.

The evanescences of the pigmentary world leave traces between figuration and abstraction. Generalized characters, draped in modern chromatic veils, declare the internal laws of icons not made by hand. The patina of time and the force of chance work through artistic imprints that bring forth a man from nothingness or dissolve, in chromatic amalgams, the grand visages of anonymous contemporaries.

The works satisfy, on the one hand, the thirst for the concrete through formal intuitions, and on the other hand, the universal tendency toward abstraction. Imagined faces become the focal point around which compositional attention pivots; our understanding of the artistic message begins with this element—the “eye of the soul.” From this perspective, the tendency to grasp the relationship between abstract figurative symbolism and the frontality of the diaphanous gaze becomes a challenge that works upon the viewer, drawn to the simple and optimistic stillness that the artist generously offers. The liberated brushwork textures visually compete with the meaning of a form, a gesture, an eyelid, or a contour. Even in objects where figuration is miniaturized and distorted to the point of caricature, the expressive power of the symbolist drawing contrasts strikingly with the natural texture of wood or the stiffened fiber of canvas. Gazing upon these Cézanne-like volumes, we are startled to discover that objectual sacrality refuses to die; and no matter how far we move from Byzantinism through expressionism, the sense of the sacred remains latent in the human mind, where it resides—preconceived—at the origin of the understanding of artistic meaning.

In this context, installations with traditional objects, projections, and happenings become combinations of the spiritual and the real, offering multiplying pretexts for understanding the postmodern human being. Through these instruments, Radu Șerban has attained a style, a technique through which he can walk the fine line of symbolist expressionism without losing the sacralized conversation of reflective chromatic fields—the artist cultivates within abstraction the pictorial energy of the uplifting sentiment that intertwines prayer and life.

Radu Șerban’s art offers the evanescence of a synapse—a connection between the spiritual sensibility of tradition and the logic of contemporary visual language. The statics of compositional dynamism and the dynamic elements of the static give rise to simple forms of understanding creative complexity and the human spirit, through the undeniable sacrality of art.

... Radu Serban is an image researcher himself. In his representation, the multiple reality is as complex as the images’ reality. Research in painting is on the edge: having to radically paint a last image. Radu Serban is aware of the fact that society can easily turn its loyalty from one aesthetic manner to another. The joy towards painting and the special interest showed for, in Radu Serban’s case, lyrical abstraction, remains an essay for better times. A well known German theorist, Wilhelm Worringer, considers abstraction like an imense need for silence. Radu Serban’s psychological approach induced in this exhibition is, in fact, an imense need for silence. 

(speech for Radu Serban’s opening at the Imagined Places, Things and Faces exhibition, UAP Gallery, Sibiu, 2009)

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Painting and drawing exhibition – Radu Serban

Radu Serban is a modern artist because he doesn’t make any discrimiantion between genres. He doesn’t set borders between them. He creates art. And he does it with inspiration, under the gifted, fruitful signs of the emotion and thinking happily joint with feeling. But the young painter and drawer is a modern artist also due to his abstracting, due to the way he decreases the plastic language to its basic components, and because of how he purges expression in order to translate it into signs the already reduced to the core forms. No matter how modern, on a closer look, through all these, Radu Serban is actually subscribing into the prestigious tradition of the Romanian vintage stylization, which spreads from the famous Moldavian frescos of Stefan the Great and Petru Rares age to Dimitrie Paciurea’s Madona Stolojan. As an excuse for the subtle black and white interpretations, some of these elements have fresco fragments and orthodox worship objects with a worthy, ancestral character. These, and I underline this, are just excuses for figuration. Radu Serban starts from them with enthuziasm, boldness, but also with cleverness and skill in order to create compositions with a high level of rigor and with complex, admirable and inspired layouts, that represent not only components, but main characters of the plastic discourse.

… In this Transylvanian fruitful, autumn afternoon’s peace, I have attended the plastic, chromatic, and graphic discourse of the exceptional, unmistakable compositions that wear the signature of an artist of real and original talent, that is Radu Serban. This discourse reminded me of another afternoon, this time a Toscan one, when, while sitting in a Romanic church, I have attended a Bach-music organ concert. It is with the organ’s sound that the phrasings and rythms of Radu Serban’s recent painting and drawing resemble.

Mircea Toca, “Adevarul de Cluj”, Cluj-Napoca, October 1993.

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Beyond the threshold

Far from being headed with iron, Radu Serban’s gates don’t close unless they are opening and they are open to protect, inside the space of a static and severe interior, the traces of sacredness which translates into both objects and faces, perceived – personally but also in the extension of a century-old tradition – as poses of some miraculous moments of a Christian mythology that is fixed in the framing of ancientry.

… The Gate of all gates. Through it, one can enter Radu Serban’s art like entering a wood church from Maramures. A space of Self-retrieval. And of Absolute. Space of Revelation, of consecutive discoveries, and of a balance given by the consciousness of belonging to a reeking world, behind which archetypes exist and productively act. Archetypes that belong to a living Christianity, one that is experienced in the immediate and direct act of life.

His artistic work is characterized by a great resource frugality. Simplicity and refinement. A discretion that reaches the edges of the most pure humility, imprisonment and abasement. A subtle revelation of an inside that palpates its abyss. Radu Serban’s “draw-signs” are the work of a scrupulous craftsman who miraculously knows how to give depth and relief to the insignificant surface of the paper. They are also the work of a gifted artist: scratching the roughness of the concrete, he discovers traces of an ancient writing, which he amazingly – amazement that goes beyong astonishment which, consequently, becomes a vertigo - knows how to replay its lost significancies. His art has something from the fascination of a palimpsest.

Mircea Petean, “Draw-signs of Radu Serban” exhibition catalogue, Cluj-Napoca, October 1996

Radu Șerban’s Miniature

What is restful in the spectacle offered by Radu Ioan Șerban’s miniature art is the absence of technological fetishism. The technical execution exudes a wholly artisanal air, eschewing flashy virtuosity in favor of an invigorating inventiveness. Innovation, warmth, irony, and detachment, a double relationship with history, and a profound inner freedom—all expressed within spatial constraints dictated by the works’ small dimensions.
...A world escaped from the scenography of a magnificent puppet theatre, from the grandmother’s dowry chest.

...The faces that emerge on the patinated surfaces of the small obelisks—surfaces that at first appear serial and anonymous—reveal themselves as personal and unrepeatable. Crowded in space and time, obstructed by history, they refuse to disappear into the anonymity of the masses. To history’s obstruction, Radu Șerban’s characters respond with calm, wise gazes from within the tiny space they have been allocated. Pressed in time and space, they continue to preserve their individuality, posing serenely and openly, even if something in their features hints at sadness, perhaps abandonment: physiognomies suspended between the faces of fasting saints in Orthodox icons and caricatures. An atmosphere evoking both Săpânța and Byzantine brilliance.

If, in general, the avant-garde jolts reality provocatively in its desire to test whether the world truly happens—whether by simulating or denouncing the simulacrum—Radu Șerban embraces the wager of formal renewal and engages with it through a sensitivity attuned to contemporary times, while somehow preserving the gentle, dreamlike wisdom of a Geppetto-like craftsman. Yet he does not ask, “Does the world happen?” (Is it real?)—instead, he affirms it directly: yes, it does happen! Like someone who has dwelled within things and understands that reality lies both in the spell that binds the world together and in the world itself.

Ironic and intelligent, warm and attentive at the same time, he builds obelisks that can stand on a bedside table. Obelisks that do not shout ideology, but are ready to tell stories to those willing to listen.

Virgil Untilă, Voces cultural magazine, Toronto, October 1998

Redemption, Compassion, Salvation
 

I believe what defines the art of miniature—and, more broadly, the art of Radu Șerban—is compassion.

Compassion for the unspectacular life story.
Compassion for the individual caught in the constraining determinisms of history.
For the forgotten, or nearly forgotten object.
For the small wonder hidden in ordinary things.
For the anonymous beauty of lifelong wives.

Compassion is the first step toward salvation.
To redeem the world... to redeem the human being... to redeem things...
All of it beginning from the small, the insignificant.
To redeem: to fulfill, to complete, to save.
To redeem beyond the triumphalist rhetoric of episodes carved out of the Apocalypse.
To redeem through tenderness, through unearthing...
To redeem: to give one more chance—to things, to the world, to the human being.

And it is not only ideas, attitudes, values, feelings or memories that are redeemed,
but also the things that have lost their use—or never had any:
scraps of wood left behind by a construction site,
empty bottles destined for the bin, river stones, old nails, twisted bits of wire.

Together or separately, the artist sees in them the ability not only to be recovered,
but to participate in the act of recovery.
What is redeemed, in turn, brings about redemption.

Things begin at the bottom—in the dust of the road.

Virgil Untilă
October 1st, 1998, Toronto

Radu Șerban belongs to a generation that, more or less programmatically and at times ostentatiously, has evolved over the past two decades within a fertile experimental space specific to postmodernity.
Within this space, where he moves with a certain dignified discretion, Radu Șerban has patiently and firmly delineated a territory of his own—originally marked by the ordering of his protean creation around a stable and radiant nucleus: his genuine vocation as a painter, gifted with a particular sensibility, poetic and reflective in nature, tinged with nostalgia.

A refined colorist and a virtuosic draftsman, the artist is also drawn to the vast technical toolkit of new media, dependent on cutting-edge technology. He explores the creation of unusual hybrid objects through inventive combinations of various media, techniques, and artistic languages. Yet, his ventures into the multi- and intermedia realms and into mixes of traditional and unconventional contemporary means remain persistently complementary to his passionate inquiries in his unmistakably favored domain: painting. These forays serve, in fact, as opportunities to expand—within an integrative approach—the artistic concerns that define his pictorial universe.

Beyond the ingenious manipulation of digital imagery and unprecedented combinations of techniques, languages, and artistic codes drawn from diverse fields (visual arts, film, music), the postmodern integrative vocation that defines the artist’s vision also reveals itself in his very mode of relating to tradition. This is accomplished through a profoundly subjective assumption (rooted in memory and remembrance) of enduring values belonging to the ancestral foundations of Romanian culture and civilization. This kind of subjective "archaeologization" consistently favors the Transylvanian village—the artist’s childhood and adolescent topos, a formative site imbued with deep affection. It provides archetypal motifs and themes of subtle symbolic or metaphorical relevance to his work.

More importantly, it brings about a natural positioning of the creator within an existential horizon infused with sacredness—peacefully ordered in time according to rules shaped by long-verified individual and communal experiences. This environment encourages the discovery and cultivation of the artist’s inner world, in harmony with the spiritual temperament of the Romanian peasant: the authentic thrill of the sacred, the longing for purity and innocence, and the joy of existing in consonance with a benevolent nature.

By rediscovering, through memory, his consubstantiality with this sensuous universe, the artist most naturally privileges one of its essential coordinates: light—the source, in the natural order, of life and vision, and, in the moral-spiritual order, of truth and justice. Light thus becomes a sublimated energetic expression of the Supreme Presence, beyond the visible.

A diffuse light, which—trembling in anticipation of the "descending transcendent"—halo-like, protects, caresses, ennobles, and redeems. Or an active light, which, together with colored matter and drawing, builds forms and images, or, mirrored in pools of water, renders them endlessly, fascinatingly changeable. In other words, it becomes the decisive factor in the spectacular orchestration of reality and reverie, of truth and illusion, of the concrete and the essentialized abstract—leading to an authentic, vibrant, and persuasive spiritualization of vision.

Livia Drăgoi, Radu Șerban – Traces, exhibition catalog, 2006

Childhood Leaves Traces

This hasn’t been proven only by psychologists. The sum of childhood experiences—both emotional and cognitive—shapes the identity of the adult permanently. No one is truly unfamiliar with this truth. Otherwise, we wouldn't hold on for a lifetime to the memory of that unrepeatable, personal paradise. Artists offer the tangible proof of its existence.

With his exhibition at the Cluj-Napoca Art Museum, Traces, Radu Șerban retrieves the marks of a paradisiacal childhood spent in a village from a timeless, vaguely idealized Romania. We witness a kind of sentimental archaeology that scenographically reconstructs, from the traces of immaterial memory, the hologram of a place and the lived experience of childhood.

Three levels of representation structure the visual discourse across various degrees of abstraction. Painting, memory boxes, and digital animation operate with a set of archetypal images that reverse the usual path—from the abstraction of painterliness to the concreteness of the screen-projected image. The artist thus assumes a process akin to a psychoanalytic exploration into the depths of memory.

In the paintings, the fragile substance of memory is reduced to purified forms of meaningful details. The hill, the house, the oven, the window—each has its own code for visual interpretation. As material landmarks of village scenography, they anchor the work in a reality that the artist never fully abandons. Bottles, demijohns, three-legged stools, and worn wooden shelves serve as contrasting objects against which the abstract materiality of painting reveals its emotion. Time has patinated the wood, peeled the plaster, and washed away the lime layers. Colors fade, merge into one another, lines dissolve into vague patches, and the palette slides from pink to gray, following the indistinct outline of memories. What remains are only the traces of a past from which memory, following rules known only to itself, has salvaged unexpected details—details through which Radu Șerban reassembles, in the abstraction of painting, the wholeness of emotion.

The memory boxes, based on the principle of the camera obscura, capture evanescent images. Translucent, immaterial drawings—literally reflected in a pool of water that acts as the mirror of the camera obscura—give substance to memory. Childhood becomes an intangible, yet visible reality, one you continue to doubt even in the face of concrete evidence.

Digital animation marks the final stage in the materialization of an idealized past. The kaleidoscope of salvaged memories parades across the screen in two-dimensional projections. Only seemingly alive, the drawings reveal the illusion of a technically recovered dynamic. But perhaps it is precisely this need for self-deception that allows the past to nourish the illusion of paradise regained with every page turned in the childhood album.

Oana Cristea Grigorescu, 2007

Painting as a Spiritual Exercise

...The artist shows a complete lack of interest in the strict concerns of visual language—issues that preoccupy many of his generational peers. Instead, he aligns himself with the most discreet realm of our contemporary painting, a twilight zone watched over by two great melancholics: Florin Mitroi and Ilie Boca. This thread of Romanian art—seemingly fragile, yet possessing great spiritual force—establishes a few defining coordinates: the absence of any ostentation, the rigorous selection of expressive means, an aversion to gratuitous beauty, and an almost mystical submission to the object...

His vision is of Byzantine lineage, but in a version stripped of all external references. What can be noted in this direction is the spirit of the image, the compositional austerity, and the immateriality of the depicted object. The image used in composition—regardless of the actual nature of the object—activates the artist’s participatory sensitivity to such a degree that it acquires the full authority of a portrait. In fact, all the works present a disguised portraiture, whether the immediate subject is a human face, a vessel, or an apple.

Beyond his intuitive grasp of the spiritual charge embedded in objects, and the way he inscribes them into a particular register of visual thought, Radu Șerban approaches painting by selecting his means with ascetic severity. His canvases gain transparency through the diaphanous nature of his brushstroke, and color loses all material weight. The chromatic range rarely extends beyond browns, ochres, or English red, while neutral backgrounds act as wide screens on which the compositions emerge with a sensitivity that conceals both knowledge and effort.

This remarkable ability to intuit, almost in an Eastern manner, the shared soul of things, and to express it visually with its full moral weight, reveals one of the great strengths of this young painter.

Pavel Șușară, Observatorul Cultural,
Bucharest, October 1991

Radu Șerban’s Art: Between Reference and Fragment

Radu Șerban works within two main coordinates in his art: one could be described as "reference" and the other as "fragmentation" or "cropping."
The “reference” points toward an iconic art—toward the traditional Romanian icon, with its Byzantine origins, distinctive graphic language, and familiar aesthetic. His personal artistic proposition lies, however, in the "cropping"—a gesture of astounding modernity.

If the reference carries an esoteric quality, so too does the cropping—but of a modern and personal kind. In this cropping lies his vision of modernity. It expresses a contemporary understanding of space.
While Byzantine art can be seen as a corridor leading toward perfection—perfection that, as Sorin Dumitrescu once said, has already been achieved by the forerunners—Radu Șerban’s cropping is his own proposed path, one that takes him in a direction uniquely his own.

It is a visual rereading, a form of postmodernism, a reinterpretation of reference through a modern lens.
At times, these elements overlap—like a palimpsest—where in certain works, he adopts the patina of color, the suggestion of lime, of old walls, of tones worn down by time. But overall, I would stress and emphasize that this cropping is the window through which we glimpse the modernity of this artist.

Alexandru Vlad,
TV Cluj broadcast, October 1993

Terra lucida is luminous earth and incarnate light. It is an intermediate realm, an isthmus between the visible universe of man and the transhuman, transvisual universe of celestial hierarchies.
— Andrei Pleșu

Painting as Soil and Body – a sealed place, dense and shadowy, that must be furrowed deeply, again and again, so that the seed of light might be revealed once more.

This is why the Image, as conceived by Radu Ioan Șerban, can only be constructed along symbolic, reversible paths: descent–ascent, crypt–throne, gate–shield, hearth–dome... The pictorial space is a closed, mysterious realm, and the forms it contains are often shielded by a clean field, undulating like an untouched canvas. At times, these forms become so intensely personalized that they break free from the protective space of the rigid frame and remain solitary and volatile—like wings of a fragile, barely sketched altar (then protected only by the warm body of wood from old “deconstructed” assemblages).

Sensitive, delicate, and yet monumental, these forms rise vertically toward a purely interior space—a kind of outpost of the still-visible, a limes at the threshold between here and beyond. Luminous and warm, these forms grow like a dome, like a dowry, like bread; they strive to fill the entire space that contains them with their abundant fullness. Sometimes, this expansion of interiority pushes the two-dimensional image toward objecthood, and the formal boundary becomes extremely subtle. The purity, suppleness, and amplitude of these forms are supported by a pictorial technique of privileged plasticity. The ancient iconographic technique—egg tempera painting—is revitalized in a modern key, but with exemplary rigor and spiritual prestige. The matte, velvety sheen of the paint gives the brushstroke a tender expressiveness, quickly softened, but retained in the vibrancy of the chromatic texture.

But there are moments when the image is disturbed in its very depth; then it becomes a tense instrument of searching, suspending all harmony and aesthetic refinement. The delicate, supple stroke turns into a scratch, a flagellation, a consuming force; and yet, however violent, the painterly gesture always retains a delicacy and discretion of utterance—a fragrance of the image, marked by a particular purity. This explains why Radu Șerban’s art carries a distinctly votive character. The image always seems offered, consecrated, weighed and received by transmundane hierarchies, and he, the painter, reveals himself to be a witness, tirelessly searching for the most truthful form of inner speech—for the palimpsest of his pictorial script holds a testament as its primal text.

In the spirit of this script, the figures are solitary—virginal, contemplative presences; their gazes are shaded, calligraphed with downward lines that amplify their melancholic expressiveness, and they bear the quiet wonder of those who have passed the tests of temptation. Their wide-open eyes and sealed mouths emphasize that their utterance is purely internal. Beyond the silence of these beings, only the pulse and whisper of the pictorial matter animate the image’s richness. And when the artist paints by agitating, scratching, and caressing this precious substance—wounding it and healing it at the same time—it is as if, through him, we too are knocking at the gate of a lost world, one which, in the grace of contemplation, we are permitted to remember, to dream, and perhaps, for a moment, to touch.

Radu Ioan Șerban knows and feels this, for he too is touched by the longing for that luminous elsewhere, as deep and high as the darkness of a well in which, at noon, stars are reflected. He knows that to paint a world where matter is built on verticality is a way of waiting—fervently yet faithfully—for the moment when, as the prophet says,
“Your light will rise in the darkness, and your gloom will be like the noonday sun.”

Ramona Novicov
From the Radu Șerban catalog, Austria, 1997