RADU ȘERBAN - TEXTS BY THE ARTIST

TEXTS BY THE ARTIST

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Radu Șerban, 2025

2025: Postscript to a Stage

Interval is not only the title of this exhibition, but also a metaphor for an inner state – a space of reflection,

a temporary suspension between what has been and what is yet to come. It is also a moment of looking back, with a blend of nostalgia, lucidity, and gratitude. In an artist’s life, there are silent thresholds, sometimes marked by age, other times by the mere awareness of an accumulation – of time, of work, of traces left behind. For me, these traces are the works themselves: visible fragments of a human passage, of a journey constantly seeking balance between interior and exterior, between form and meaning.

After the Continuum exhibition (2020), I felt the need to reconfigure the relationship between idea, material, and image. This new corpus of works gathers the results of studio experiments carried out over recent years, in which I explored new relationships between gesture and meaning, between memory and the present, between visual structures and poetic vibrations. Each cycle started from an intuition, from a concrete fragment – an image from reality, a texture, a state – which was then distilled and refined through a deliberate mode of expression.

In Archaeology of a Passage, the village gate becomes a threshold object, a marker of boundary and transformation. I was interested not only in its form, but also in its potential to generate a visual meditation on interstices – on that in-between which defines our daily and existential transitions. Compositionally,

I worked with the rhythm of the vertical planks, combined with the diagonals that fasten them – a tension between stability and direction, between closure and opening. The gate is also seen as a visual filter: it delimits, yet allows a fragmented perception of what lies “on this side” and “beyond” the grid. The open spaces between the planks become windows towards a visual and symbolic beyond, raising questions about the invisible interior and the revealed exterior.

The Wheel of Time originates in a wooden bas-relief carved into my aunt’s gate in Aluniș/Sălaj, an ancestral motif transformed here into a nucleus for visual reflection on the passage of time. The works simultaneously explore three registers: chromatic, gestural, and symbolic. Chromatically, each piece evokes a distinct atmosphere, suggesting inner states or times of day: morning, dusk, silence, smoldering fire, muted tones, abyss. These variations are not mere aesthetic exercises, but attempts to pictorially translate the subtle vibrations of a subjective experience of time. The pictorial gesture, at once free and controlled, becomes a script of the ephemeral, marking the oscillations and suspensions that define the perception of passing.

The symbolic dimension is emphasized through the insertion of a central graphic sign, constant in each work: the four diagonals of the circle. This geometric structure refers to ancient systems of spatial organization, to the logic of the four cardinal points as markers of totality and spatial balance, as well as to the symbolism of the Christogram. The circle, crossed by diagonals, thus becomes an archetype of cyclicity and of the tension between fixation and movement, between permanence and transformation. As a whole, The Wheel of Time proposes a pictorial cartography of interior time fragments, where visual elements, gesture, and symbol converge in a poetic reflection on becoming.

In The Silence of Simple Things, I approached the materiality of wood – not as raw matter, but as a bearer of cultural and spiritual meanings. Inspired by the walls and structures of wooden churches in Sălaj, I sought to translate into image that dense form of silence, a silence charged with meaning, which intensifies presence and moment, memory and the spirit of place. I introduced essential symbolic elements into these works: the carved rope – a recurring motif encircling the churches, suggesting continuity, connection, and protection – and the fragmented windows, which can be read as interfaces between sacred and profane, between the silent interior and the outer world. These architectural details become points of visual and semantic tension, between opacity and transparency, between withdrawal and communication.

In Thoughts Between Weavings, I started from the visual suggestion of traditional weavings, of rugs made from strips of reused fabric, bearers of domestic memory. I was interested not only in their decorative aspect, but especially in the tension between the rhythmic order of weaving and the fragility of repurposed material. Within this interaction, the pictorial gesture follows the flow of the lines but introduces interruptions, overlays, and voids, suggesting the thoughts that traverse the flow of daily life, the interweaving of continuity and discontinuity, of stability and vulnerability. The fabric thus becomes a metaphorical space where visual matter and affective memory intertwine subtly.

The Florilegium series is an exploration of floral form, not in a botanical, descriptive sense, but as a symbol of ephemerality, rebirth, and diversity. Flowers become pretexts for chromatic, compositional, and gestural variations, each image proposing a small, self-contained universe, like fragments of an imagined garden. In Florilegium, the cycle of seasons turns into a meditation on the flow of life. Spring, Autumn, Winter, and Time refer not only to natural phenomena but also to states of mind, inner configurations where nature and the human mirror each other.

The Vibration of Nature series continues a line of research present in earlier stages of my artistic journey, centered on how nature is perceived and transposed in visual terms. My interest has not been in the naturalistic representation of landscape, but rather in capturing subtle vibrations, the inner energies animating living matter. The pictorial gesture follows these pulsations, while the chromatics suggest the discreet breathing of nature: from water’s play to vegetal rustle, from the dialogue of light and shadow to the secret rhythms of growth and transformation. Each work thus becomes a sensitive notation of a living presence in perpetual metamorphosis.

Finally, TopoGraphs represent an investigation of trace and time in their processual dimension. Created through frottage with bocșe charcoal on paper, these works record a different kind of interval – not a conceptual or metaphorical one, but a concrete one, concerning duration, rhythm, repetition. Each work was created on a specific day, with the date visibly inscribed, emphasizing the cyclic and meditative character of the artistic gesture. It is a form of affective cartography, where time becomes visible matter, sedimented through the direct relationship between surface and gesture.

All these cycles reflect a constant concern for the coherence of vision and visual expression. Beyond mere formal diversity, what links them is a fidelity to a personal way of seeing and constructing the image – a recognizable stylistic imprint, consolidated over time without becoming rigid. Moreover, many of these cycles are not closed: some are only at the beginning of their course and will continue to develop in the coming years, as natural extensions of directions already opened in the studio. If there is a common trait, it may lie in this continuity of searching and in the trust given to the working process as a space for reflection and discovery. Interval thus becomes a measure of passage – not through numbers or anniversaries, but through the visible layers of searching, sedimented in the image fragments left behind.

Radu Șerban, June 2025

Radu Șerban, 2020

There Is a Time for ReRemembering

“Life is not what you lived, but what you remember and how you remember it in order to tell it.”
— Gabriel García Márquez

Memory is a film imprinted in the subconscious. The constant effort to remember keeps memory awake. The blurred portions of that film are the result of forgetting. Forgetting is the fog of memory. It can be indirectly defined as the very thing memory strives to overcome—a continuous struggle to retrieve and evoke the passage of time. Remembrance and re-remembering can best be understood in relation to forgetting.

For me, looking back means turning to memory, returning inward, to that intimate place where all the events of our lives are stored, and from which we draw everything that probes and stimulates us spiritually—more easily, sometimes, than reading from a book. Through this appeal to memory, to remembrance and re-remembering, former places and objects, experiences and emotions from different moments in life—overlaid with present experience—become stimuli, pretexts that fuel artistic vision and guide the creative process toward a secondary elaboration, in which raw material is refined and synthesized.

The time of re-remembering—a palimpsest of lived and creative experience—has arrived for me now. Even though re-remembering implies a vector directed toward the past, it is also a moment of reverie and dreaming. A reverie that lets what once was wander across the visual field of thought, and a dream that pre-visualizes what might still come to be.

I have decided to revisit, to archive and re-archive scattered documents related to my artistic practice, to select and organize images of works—starting with the few paintings I created as a child (the only ones that have survived from that time) and continuing through to my most recent solo exhibitions.

My works, my thoughts, my solo exhibitions, catalogs and posters, as well as significant moments from my path, are presented in this album in chronological order, structured according to time periods and places of creation, the stylistic evolution of the image, and the technical solutions explored. Contextual critical commentary anchors and clarifies the defining characteristics of each developmental phase. At the beginning of each subchapter, I include brief textual notes on the context in which each series of works was created, along with relevant period details. These references may be read as direct confessions.

The structure of this volume aims to reconstruct the entirety of my artistic journey—from my earliest works created during middle school, through the years of study and accumulation, the period of defining a personal direction in painting by experimenting with stylistic and technical solutions both in the studio and in nature, and extending to recent multimedia expressions and curated projects in various exhibition venues.

The reproductions follow a temporal sequence, guided by the period and location in which they were created, by their stylistic language, and by the technical approaches employed.

I have selected samples from the following cycles:
Simple Objects (1988–1990), Byzantium (1988–1998), Invented Landscapes (2004, 2009), Woman I (2008), Imagined Faces (1992–1996, 2006–2010), Painted Vessels (1998, 1999), Painted Objects (1997, 1998), Woman II (1998–2000), Objects from Within (2000–2002), Invented Landscapes (2004–2009), Traces (2004–2006), The Image of the Image (2008), Flowers of Thought (2006–2009), Parallels (2008, 2009), The Patina of the Wall, Aspects of the Woman (2008–2011), Ephemerides (2011, 2012), Estella’s Game, Unidentified Characters, Verges, Reused Palettes and Unidentified Characters (2012), The Vibration of Nature (2008–2016), Herbarium (2014–2017), Geometries from the Everyday (2013–2019), Traces on Water (2015–2018), and Waters (2016–2020).

Across this succession of works, there is a wide diversity of Final Image, grounded in variations of:
scale (from very small to monumental),
support (wood, paper, canvas, glass),
technique (from traditional egg tempera on gessoed wood to digital animation and digital print),
and stylistic register (from distilled figurative expression to suggestive abstraction).

In fact, this album—through its structure and graphic conception—can be considered my most recent work, one that underscores the versatility of my artistic identity.

Radu Șerban, Foreword to the album „ReAmintiri”, 2020

Radu Șerban, 2019

Toronto. From Egg Tempera to Computer

In 1997, under favorable circumstances, my family and I arrived in Toronto. With a portfolio of works created in Romania and two catalogs in hand from the very beginning of my stay, I proposed exhibition projects to several galleriesa in Toronto. The director of Teodora Art Gallery immediately agreed to organize my first exhibition and represent me for promotion in Canada. I was to create the works for that debut show, and later, present further exhibition projects. I had brought with me from Romania a series of sketches intended either to continue or to reformulate the phase I was compelled to concluade back home. In retrospect, I can say that during the first two years the thematic essence was maintained, continued, and adapted, and due to the new context, I had to rework everything related to technique and support.

In my body of work, three-dimensional wooden supports began to appear, prepared similarly to the way wooden icons are made. The novelty of these artistic objects lies in the fact that, unlike the previously created two-dimensional drawings or paintings, the working process is now intentionally left visible: the wood’s fiber, the control lines, annotations, and partially the canvas, muslin, and gesso. In the case of painting, all these elements were previously hidden beneath the painted surface. For the first exhibition, the supports were made from posts salvaged from a decommissioned fence. Later, I met the sculptor Nicăpetre, who had emigrated to Canada many years before. When he learned about what I intended to create, he invited me to his studio—a large Canadian barn—and provided me with his tools, thus greatly easing the phase of preparing these supports.

Thematically, allusions to a world with Byzantine roots remained evident. Gradually, however, the subjects became more secular, the inventory of used elements expanded, and a return to bidimensionality became imminent. Likewise, my technical approach underwent changes. Whereas in Romania I preferred to work in egg tempera with emulsion (and occasionally use oil glazes), here the use of acrylic paints became predominant. Starting in 1998, the computer transformed into a stimulating workspace that replaced traditional sketches. Through it, generating variants and variations became inexhaustible. Following the production of computer animations—based on elements extracted from digitized works arranged in a film-like sequence—I generated stop-frames that themselves became starting points for the series titled Objects from Within. The ellipse, in its various manifestations, emerged as the primary element insinuating itself onto the canvas surfaces. Acrylic paints were combined with matte gels or even silicone, with a satin-like film finish becoming a characteristic of the series.

In 2002, on the occasion of the Toronto International Art Fair, Teodora Art Gallery exhibited three works of mine at its own stand. Also during that period, a new versatile theme appeared in my creation, which, after my return to Romania, was further developed into the project Cutia cu amintiri (The Memory Box). This project centers on painting on glass containers (bottles).

The nearly four years spent in Canada were significant for me, resulting in the creation of several series of works presented in four solo exhibitions. Additionally, my specialization in graphic design, web design, and digital animation facilitated my work within a dynamic team of programmers at one of General Electric’s branches in Markham.

Radu Șerban, August 2020

Foreword to the album ReRemembering

In general, an artist’s identity is shaped by the interwoven relationship between three key dimensions: theoretical knowledge and intellectual accumulation; personal experiences and emotional states that define the thematic landscape and interests; and practical expertise—the choice of materials, tools, and technical solutions, all of which significantly influence stylistic orientation. To these, one must add three equally crucial conditions: talent, inspiration, and the artist’s degree of involvement—that is, the inner reserve of passion made available to the act of creation.

In a sharply defined opinion offered by Horea Bernea, there are two distinct categories of artists: those of the one painting, who reach a personal code of expression, a synthesis of language that they explore in a single, predictable direction; and those of the last painting, artists who constantly question themselves, who search, experiment, remain open to new expressive modes. I’ve reflected often on this distinction and would like to believe I belong to the latter category—those restless artists who never settle into one formula, who shape their visual discourse in relation to medium, technique, material, or support, and not to trends or times.

Artistic identity—shaping a personal style—is a dynamic process rooted in the sum of experiences embedded in our inner self: memories, dreams, projections. It is an ongoing struggle between knowledge and synthesis, between the entirety of our intellectual, emotional, and physical experience, and the desire to refine, distill, and express that through the concise language of art.

For me, the phases of artistic becoming have been diverse, marked by questions and answers, hesitation and return, reformulation and readjustment. I did not seek out a distinct signature style, nor did I deliberately follow trends, although at times I longed to be part of artistic groups toward which I felt elective affinities.

At the core of my artistic concerns has always been what we call nature: first and foremost, the human figure—dual in nature, physical and spiritual—but also the natural world itself, with all its beauty, phenomena, states, and mysteries. My artistic activity can be easily circumscribed by the notion of transparency-transcendence (transaparență), as it encompasses terms from lived experience—discovery, wonder, joy, fulfillment, obsession—and from the language of visual creation—synthesis, reformulation, spontaneity, gesture, playfulness, return.

I believe there are no major or minor themes in art; what matters is the artist’s level of commitment, the way in which they shape and fulfill their vision. And there are providential people and moments that can influence, guide, inspire, or change the direction one is on.

Let me mention a few such moments from my journey—one that is still in progress:

In 1979, in Cluj, at the Sports Hall, a major exhibition was held: The Artist at Work in America. It was a stunning demonstration of creative power, bringing to Transylvania some of the biggest names in American contemporary art: Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Arshile Gorky, Helen Frankenthaler, and Louise Nevelson. For a local artistic community used to provincial exhibitions, this show—filled with Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Minimalism, and Conceptual Art—was shockingly divergent. As a high school senior at the Art Lyceum, I experienced it as something unprecedented, deeply stirring, unforgettable. The echoes of that event accompanied my graduation, underscored by the solemn notes of the Gaudeamus anthem.

A few years later, as a student at the Bucharest Institute of Fine Arts, I attended voluntary literature classes led by poet Ioan Alexandru—true spiritual explorations into biblical meaning. There, I encountered key figures of contemporary Romanian art: Ion Bitzan, Horia Bernea, Florin Mitroi, Horea Mihai, Paul Gherasim, Sorin Dumitrescu, Ion Nicodim, Marin Gherasim, Geta Brătescu, Wanda Mihuleac—artists of diverse orientations: neo-traditionalist, neo-Byzantine, or consciously unconventional.

In 1985, during the Student Art Camp in Gurghiu, Professor Vasile Drăguț awarded me the UAP’s First Prize in Painting for emerging artists. In 1986, as a third-year student in the class of Professor Marius Cilievici (to whom I remain grateful), I participated in the National Youth Exhibition in Bucharest. That was, for me, the official start of my professional career—though my first solo show had already taken place in my hometown, Jibou, shortly after graduating from high school.

Between 1987 and 1990, while teaching art in Călărași, I met art critic Pavel Șușară, with whom I’ve maintained a long-lasting friendship.

In 1990, I became a member of the UAP and returned to Cluj-Napoca, where I began teaching at the “Ioan Andreescu” Academy of Visual Arts. In 1991, I had my first major solo exhibition at the Căminul Artei Gallery in Bucharest, supported by Professor Corina Popa. In 1992, I received the Painting Prize at the Young Artists Competition organized by the Dominus Gallery, under Professor Zamfir Dumitrescu. That same year, I was part of the Ecce Homo group exhibition, which won the UAP Youth Prize. In 1993, my first solo exhibition in Cluj brought me a second UAP Youth Prize; the show was opened by critic Mircea Țoca. In 1996, at Pantheon Gallery in Cluj, I organized DeSemne, opened by poet Mircea Petean.

Between 1997 and 2002, I lived in Canada, supported by Teodora Art Gallery, which hosted four of my solo exhibitions. In 2002, I took part in my first international art fair in Toronto.

In 2006, I earned my PhD in Visual Arts with a doctoral exhibition, Traces, presented at the Cluj Art Museum and opened by Dr. Livia Drăgoi, my advisor. In 2010, the same museum hosted TransAparences, a quasi-retrospective exhibition opened by its director Călin Stegerean and critic Pavel Șușară.

After 2010, I continued to exhibit solo at the Museum of Comparative Art in Sângeorz-Băi, the Cultural and Art Center of Sălaj County, and the UAP Gallery in Sibiu.

Since 2016, I have had the honor of collaborating with art critic Mircea Oliv on several major projects. At Arcade 24 Gallery in Bistrița, I presented the first exhibition under the title Glissando. The year 2018 marked an especially significant stage in my artistic journey, with three solo exhibitions: two continued the Glissando cycle, presented in Cluj and Târgu Mureș; the third, Waters and Caresses, was shown at the Brâncoveanu Palaces Cultural Center in Mogoșoaia.

This current album is intended as the beginning of a personal archive—one that I will certainly continue to develop and update over time. Its creation required considerable time and effort, but I hope its audience—art lovers, scholars, and the broader public—will appreciate this bold endeavor, coming from a creator committed both to his own path and to the deeper meaning and destiny of artistic creation.

In a time defined by haste, superficiality, and impermanence, I believe our passage through the world must leave a trace—for our contemporaries, and for those who will follow.
An artist’s works, after all, are nothing less than the artist’s very life.

Radu ȘERBAN
August, 2020

Radu Șerban, 2010

TransAppearances was originally the title of a digital animation I created in 2005—a visual meditation on the world we inhabit, on the mystery of light and life. It was, at once, a reflection in the mirror of time and in the “mirror” of a window carved into the wooden wall of a church. The project was built around symbolic and contemplative elements: light, life, water, mirror, window, and icon—each serving as a pretext for introspection, for a quiet dialogue with the self and the surrounding world.

The term TransAppearance evokes a newly imagined world imbued with a spiritual essence, where the object of reference is transformed into an autonomous image—independent of narrative context. It also speaks to a deeper process: a background play of thought and emotion, where artistic language, intuition, and expression interweave.

Over the past two decades, my artistic practice has consistently circled around this concept. It encompasses both the emotional experience of reality—discovery, wonder, joy, fulfillment, obsession—and the vocabulary of visual creation: synthesis, reformulation, precision, spontaneity, gesture, transformation, and play.

The works featured on this site are grouped into seven distinct cycles, each defined by its period of creation, visual language, and technical approach. The final image shifts across a wide spectrum—ranging in size (from intimate to monumental), material (wood, paper, canvas), technique (from traditional egg tempera on prepared wooden panels to digital animation and print), and style (from refined figuration to suggestive abstraction).

Radu Șerban, 2006

The reproductions presented in this catalogue (Radu Șerban / Traces) are grounded in a concept that reflects an interdisciplinary intention—a creative weaving together of traditional techniques and contemporary artistic means. The works follow three distinct directions in exploring image expression, each shaped by a different stylistic approach, closely tied to the materials and techniques employed. The media of focus are:

Painting
The paintings in the Traces cycle outline a path toward the purification of form—achieved through the expressive precision of gesture and a liberated use of color. Detached from concrete, object-based references, color becomes a refined painterly plasma, in constant transformation and reshaping. The resulting images retain evanescent traces of objects, filtered through memory, along with the discreet imprint of the artist’s nostalgic introspection.

Artistic Object
The Memory Box cycle introduces the concept of the trace-image, proposing a hybrid object that fuses the image-making principle of the darkroom with the visual suggestions of Transylvanian reverse glass painting. This represents both a re-evaluation and a postmodern revalorization of tradition, now integrated with contemporary techniques of light manipulation. The image, painted on the reverse side of a glass plate, is projected by a beam of light onto a surface of water functioning as a mirror—offering the viewer an image that is immaterial, fluid, and ephemeral.

Digital Animation
Static images—originally conceived in painting or drawing—are transformed, alongside photographs, into digital raw material. These become animated sequences, structured through transitions and connections, giving rise to short film compositions with clearly defined narrative, script, and timing. (Examples include the Flash animations Memories about Thoughts and TransAppearances—still frames from which are also included in the catalogue.)

Radu Șerban, 2005

Painting on Glass Bottles
Excerpt from the chapter “Personal Creation” included in the doctoral thesis, 2005

One of the experimental stages of my artistic journey took place in 1998, when the support for my works became the glass vessel. I set out to experiment with the issue of the “composed image”, to observe how the image interacts with the medium it belongs to—what happens to an image created on a transparent, rigid, three-dimensional support (a glass container), an image which itself can be retained, altered, or distorted by a second transparent medium: water, the contents of the glass container.

The entire experiment was conceptually rooted in the reverse glass painting technique traditionally used in iconography, which I transferred from a flat support to a volumetric one. The painting was executed on the part of the vessel not directly visible; all other sides intended for viewing were obscured through grounding, leaving only a transparent slit—a kind of viewfinder—through which the eye could access the painted image. Because the glass walls of the containers were concave, convex, or polyhedral, and because their smoothness was often interrupted by irregularities in the glass mass, the painted image would deconstruct and reconstruct itself, continuously shifting depending on the viewer’s angle.

In the next phase of the experiment, the vessels were filled with water—sometimes colored—so that the image could also be perceived on the horizontal surface of the water, which now acted as a mirror. Thus, the image became triply affected or transformed: first by the glass wall of the container, then by the water itself (which distorted the image behind it), and finally by the water's reflection, which projected a version of the original image.

I began seeking vessels of increasingly varied forms, experimenting by introducing liquids and manipulating levels and light sources, testing the possibility of “capturing” the trace of the master image. I considered the experiment successful when, through the unpainted slit of one of the containers, only the reflection of a concealed image, located somewhere on the inner rear wall of the vessel, could be seen suspended in water.

In fact, this early experiment became the starting point for my doctoral thesis: a fascinating idea that demanded further investigation—one that invited a more profound and sustained research.