Page 9 - THE DECAMERON: 100 Days on 100 Etchings by Petru Rusu

Boccaccio’s fantastic solicitation that the artist renews
Decameron on 100
Graphic Interpretations
by Petru Rusu
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
Russu’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,
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.
His sheets are precious for their vivid, but
softened chromatic that insinuates among the
spaces made by a skillful etching mark aware
of the expressive qualities of that medium.
In front of Rusu’s engravings, we have the
sensation of being in the front of ancient
miniatures, singularly “oriental”, suddenly
animated by tensions enchantments, empiric
but actual starts and plots. Undoubtedly, there
is a surrealist component in Rusu’s figurative
world that gives to the author the freedom
to reach a fantastic dimension as space of
visionary revelation (here we can’t forget the
great lesson of the Romanian Brauner, with his
peculiar, archetypal surrealism).
Regarding these same Rusu’s sheets, Dan
Haulica spoke about a ”double dimension of
technological mechanics and organic unity”.
Actually, the visionary world of Petru Rusu
seems to allude to both those dimension, as
two competing archetypes in the folds of our
reality. They seem to be indistinguishable
inside his visionary plot, where the explicit
components are just the floating presences of
surreal symbolic figures.
Those dimensions remain at the stage of
spheres of allusion. They are references of the
mechanical plot of our contemporary world and
of the iconic plot that chases us daily. But they
are even references of a remote organic root,
of an anthropological truth on which are based
the motivations of a visionary symbolism, like
Rusu’s one.
Enrico Crispolti
Art critic, Curator and Historian, 1987 Rome Italy
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