It is amazing that this author is obsessively concerned with portraits and self-portraits .We also have to mention that in both cases he does not use self-irony or sarcasm as we could imagine somebody who started to be interested of the circus as an art theme would .However,exposing yourself artistically belongs in a way to exhibitionism,typical to the show arts because by painting insistently your portrait means to participate in the show ,exposing yourself ,standing out,showing your identity, your irreducible structure .In a broad way ,any masterpiece,any creation requires a narcissistic act and an aggression towards the world around you ,that the creator wants to change, to dominate ,to subordinate in a way and up to a certain point .By making his portrait, he is offering himself to others and at the same time he is searching desperately for his own self ,fulfilling a dramatic narcissistic act on the long road of looking for his final self .We have to be clear about one thing : Dumitru Ivan is not a real portrait –maker because I have seen only two portraits made to others : one of his mother,as a tribute of his filial devotion and the other one of a really exceptional value ,of his wife .The second one, reminded me through the induced holiness of the brush,of a portrait made by Sabin Popp to Irina Codreanu,also a painter when both of them were students at The Fine Arts Institute in Bucharest. As in the work of the painter who prematurely ended his life in Vienna (who everybody considered holy ) here,with this recent author there is a striking,celestial ,angelic trace of the face portrayed .
The self –portraits are really significant ,being desperate searches of his artistic self always returning to himself and not to others .It is like a rage of dissatisfaction would make him repeat this search endlessly as he would like to register a life history of his face ,always different yet still the same .Two points are to be made here ,one about the volumetry of the drawing,the other one about the color .To clarify the points I made, we should remember the fact that when I describe Dumitru Ivan’s personality I distinguish two distinct compartments: the first belongs to the professional who paints flowers,still life,landscapes on one hand,and on the other hand the real artist who is unfolding an artistic thought of a striking originality in his work.Then I have to consider the series of his multitude of self-portraits as a border between the two sections of his work .Through drawing,these belong to the first category,having in common the strongly suggested presence of the third dimension of the space ,while by the colors used surrealistically in their own way,the above mentioned self-portraits attach themselves to the second category where the third dimension is diminuated sometimes to a complete disappearance .
The drawing from Dumitru Ivan’s portraits is vigorous, emphasizing the architecture of the head and the strong identity of the volumes creating it The respective volumes are so evident that for a moment you could think the drawing hand is hiding a sculptor’s hand .The next moment ,the painter is taking revenge and places colors on that realistic drawing,so lively,so expressive,beyond any realistic pretense,because they talk disclosing aggressively not the way the model was portrayed but only the frenzy of the artist when he was painting his own portrait.Thus,the portrait in case does not belong fully to the mimesis category but to the lyrical one,to the artistic subjectivity .That is why , the self-portraits are not documents of an evolution in time of a face,even of a strictly personal nature .The colors thrown with excitement by the author on this drawing convey many feelings like sadness,despair,melancholy,dark pessimism,disillusionment about the destiny of the world even about God’s .
The last and far more important part than the others belonging to Dumitru Ivan’s work is the one displayed over hundreds of paintings on canvas or on board, on oils or acrylics ,ink drawings or other combination techniques using pastels or charcoal, often crushing the colors directly from the tubes on the work surface,the one where he is raising in the most sacred tone an exalted hymn to feminine sensuality .He started tentatively by tackling the twisted feminine body in a spasmodic movement,rigidly presented geometrically while the background of those paintings were relinquished to small and scholarly games of shades mostly red .And all of a sudden the artist is stepping decisively towards his favorite subject :the feminity in rebellion, aggressive,unbashful and yet of a sacred purity .You can feel a tough realism of the sensual and feminine sentiment and nothing or too little of the formal realism because the artist abandons any claim to suggesting depth,volume and the likeness to reality in his paintings .Using a character ,two or more,the author describes ,or better said ,recreates feminity .Remakable is the work where two women insinuate an overwhelming feminity,showing strength,defiance in sensuality like ripe fruits oozing of so much sap exploding from their bodies.The impression ,the idea is really overwhelming .The realism of the image does not count as it is totally absent .The women’s figures shown are heavy with so much plenary matter and their image ignores strikingly any resemblance with anatomies from the real world .We see immediately that they are dancers who are not resembling in any way Degas’ ballerinas ,toe-dancing sylfids aerial ‘par excellence’.They have heavy flesh ,as dense as lead ( not taking in consideration the color that is always brilliant ) ,explosive,exactly like the model’s flesh repeated indefinitely in different other positions by Maillol in his sculptures .In order to analyze the force and originality of this artistic thought I resorted to a situation from an excerpt by Paul Valery ,the poet who dared two millennia after Plato,to imagine new philosophical dialogues using Socratis as a protagonist .In one of these dialogues entitled “L’ame et la danse ‘,the poet from the last century seems to virtually see the old thinker from the ancient Athens,leading his young disciples and watching some women dancing.He is thinking that they are placed through their activity much higher than the philosophers .He considers them superior because they can express their thoughts not simply just in words but in a more ample and complex way ,through their bodies .They think and communicate their thoughts through their whole bodies ,while the poor philosophers use only their brains to think and express only insipid words .I imagine Dumitru Ivan here ,in this situation sneaking in among Socratis ‘disciples with his easel ,trying to retain in his painting what the dancers are thinking,their philosophy extended to their bodies, and thus of an unequal complexity .
I have stated that up to a point this work cannot be considered realism,but surrealism in its raving alternative,in an expressionist manner with strong metaphysical tints bordering the abstract painting from which it borrows enough technique elements of artistic expression .And yet,what its author reveals is most convincing, plausible and very original .The plausibility of the image here is not placed first,but the feelings it conveys because we deal overall with the veracity of the artistic thoughts.This fact is emphasized by the unleashed movement of the brush,because each work from this cycle through its supposed gesture seems to be elaborated almost instantly , being rather the product of an instantaneous dicte ,overflowing with consciousness,the spasmodic shorthand of a feeling strangled by emotion .The dancers are voluptuous but not lascivious and yet aggressively feminine,unleashed and paradoxically extremely pure,women with massive bodies,in very lively colors,mostly acrylics .They are lonely nudes,sometimes in groups of two,three or more,so well built ,they would have enchanted even master Francois Villon ,women who have reached the peak of their sexual blossoming ,exploding of such a hormonal abundance .
There is a perceptive,permanent ascent in this artistic work because by successive refinement ,the reference to reality is gradually fading away and the initial spontaneity gives way to expert elaboration more and more abruptly .Big nets make the identifying the correspondence between art and the world around it ,more difficult,thus complicating the way we perceive the painting .Spreading all over the surface of the painting,they are part of an artistic ermetization that the author applies to his artwork .These irregular, ample but lively structures which I named nets place themselves on smaller organic shapes being only the magnifying glass of some other shapes appearing as tissues, discovered on the microscope in a histology laboratory .They could be like irregular but living rings from a cut tree ,phosphorescent intarsias,successive alternate holes .In all of these images you guess the shapes of women moving graciously (maybe dancing ?) with heads as ovals like in Ion Barbu’s verse ,”And our heads ,if they exist are ovals, as pale as a mistake “.The same thing happens with the other parts of the women’s anatomy :breasts,thighs,hips,calves,sensual abdomens,all in a supposed unity There are big panels stretching under a dominant color with other different games of color shades controlled with mathematical precision but extremely free with waves crowding on top of each other,masterful compositions,musical streaks, close nuclei, separations hugging each other .
Maybe these are structures of the matter which is not at all compact as we were guessing before .they could be a fabric of trajectories that draw womanly bodies,frugal but intensely voluptuous that warn you of revealing themselves and yet not fully being left in the stage of a promise of a perpetual delusion.Maybe they are only some modules of a promised fulfillment,mysterious,runes,hieroglyphs of a feminine secret described in a final undescipherable alphabet .
These paintings I am referring to are huge panels of oils on canvas,sometimes individualities ,some other times associated in groups of two or three in a dominant color,joined by a scholarly game of colored nuances,with undulating knots,with routes and intersections,with vital itineraries,with shapes alternating holes,real and ample blood sources .This is a world through which a colorful diverse blood is pulsing like in Rilke’s Inferno when Orpheus is passing through looking for his Euridice .That dark ,red blood is pulsing there through the transparent roots of the world, intensely ,underground .You can watch the contours of such mandalas and their undulations ,especially those from the pastels which have to be perceived closely enough, maybe through a magnifying glass,in order to unravel the contortions,the thin lines only intersections and juxtapositions Such an artwork not only pleases the eye hedonistically and aesthetically ,but that person who watches it as an unrepeatable mandala,who accepts to lose his soul in the multiple intersecting images,that one is offered real spiritual exercises of purifying and raising the spirit .
Among all the works belonging to Dumitru Ivan only two big panels strike as different from the others,although,as paintings they integrate completely into his creation .They are totally different from the rest of his creation but only through their themes : in one we see a sequence from a rugby game and in the other one,a crucifixion, a classical theme but,ambitiously original in the end .In the first one we prefigure instead of feminine bodies ,those of men captured in the grip of a specific sports cluster.The ovals of the heads are competing with the ovals of the rugby balls .Two straight lines that traverse the painting in a parallel direction,suggesting the sides of a goal,unify and separate the composition.
In the case of Crucifixion the structure of the work is similar,up to a point ,being also composed of ovals .However,the painter’s intervention offers a clear key to understanding the artwork :a minimal crucifix placed laterally opens the way to identifying a Christ who isn’t crucified as we know, but is hanging over the arms of the cross with his head heavily dropped on the side, a Christ abandoed perpetually by the Father from heavens who left him there in final distress. At the foot of the cross,a woman with hidden identity is crouching .She could be the Mother of God .
When an art personality is really genuine,then it proves to be not tragic in a way,surely dramatic ,with the back against the wall.In the same way,the painting that respects itself is also tragical,fatally with its back against the wall,crucified,frontally irreparable .There is no interpolation possible between its developed surface revealed fully and our glance that could alleviate the impact.
The chance of an artwork is viable only if it shows the complete truth. Dumitru Ivan ,a great painter is to be discovered !
ION PAPUC, writer and philosopher
New York 2013