Page 218 - Art-In-Vogue

Petru ruSu

In Rusu’s work, these mechanisms are easily comparable to
an inner organ. The funnels, the crutches and all the mechanisms
of that artistic tradition become in some of his engravings similar
to the movement of the watches of Callot’s engraving, a world in
which this dimension has already gone through the vulnerability
of human nature.

In our technological time, this dimension-both mechanical
and organic-perfectly obeys a contemporary attitude. It is not
casual in fact, that Petru Rusu has already been invited to
participate at exhibitions regarding themes about the contemporary
experimentalism: “Space-Mirror”, “Alternative”; but he has also
demonstrated his interest for that subject in his solo-shows.
Undoubtedly, he likes this kind of investigation. Here, in his
work, about Boccaccio’s Decameron, he has transferred all his
fundamental problems. In fact, when an illustrator approaches a
masterpiece of the past, it is legitimate that he carries with himself
all his cultural background, his problems, his sensibility.
Petru Rusu is a courageous artist. During the years his work
has been correlated by austere and sober solutions, as by more
provocative, colorful liveliness. All these prolific variations are
characterized by two main things: the stimulating resumption of
a great cultural model, the importance of a certain persistency.
The fact that Boccaccio was one of the first readers of Homer’s
original texts and an artist capable to conjugate the “holly studies”
with an apparent frivolousness, can conduces-as illustrators-to
assume as a gift this prolific persistency.*
Dan Hãulicã,
President of the Art international Critic Association / AICA

Consequently, we can easily say that the artistic attitude of Petru
Russu is like a sort of a dialogue around the origins of the middle
European Expressionism. Nevertheless, here the artist privileges
the game among historical-stylistic connotation which overcome
that main quality: suddenly he wants to reach a formal mechanism
verifiable in the entire cycle dedicated to Calendrino, with all those
lamentable cases that Boccaccio assigns him. It is a mechanism
comparable to some tendency of the modern art: the mechanic
anatomy of Picabia’s drawings, Duchamp, the facetious combination
of Tinguely and Luginbuhl, where the sense of humor doesn’t
exclude an accent of restlessness.

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