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Reviews |
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Mihai Ispir
ARTA nr. 1/1989
Enigmatic and upsetting, the characters Camelia Crisan
populates her paintings with answer to the exteriorization
needing of a world of airy vision, where the spectator
is invited with benevolence, but not without malice,
to recognize his own fears, obsessions, repressions.
Gregarious, pusillanimous symbols of a translucent abysmal
sadness, at other times feverishly animated by a pervers
vitality,the above-mentioned characters, as if taken
out of a secret Pandora's box, are then schemed and
distri buted in no less delirious, grotesque or absurd
situations. Some of these have the air of tantalizing
tortures, but which are consumed in closed spaces, with
claustrophobic alussions. Others imply impossible or
repulsive actions. Sometimes the characters are represented
as tied up, as a mere indication of certain inner restrictions
and pressures, unspeakable, but maybe psycho-analysable.
The properties of such scenes also include elements
of harmless implements turned, by dimension unverting
and reductio ad absurdum into objects having the malevolent
air of torture tools ("Pit") or the ubiquitous motif
of the cloth, invested with various connotations, from
the most familiar ("Laundry", "Summer House") to the
most siphisticated ones. Sometimes the cloth transforms
itself in a kind of raised curtain, in view of a presumed
and caricatural improvised vulgar show. At other times
the cloth is atransparent drapery, yet preventing, as
in a nightmare, more or less definite actions ("The
Rat Hunter"). Finally, at times, the cloth becomes a
liquid surface offering a clearer indication about its
general significance in the proposed iconography: that
of a separating screen to some distinct enviroments
and worlds. Stylistically the dominant note is the neoexpresionist
one, with reminiscences from Ensor or the Modern German
graphic arts. From Ensor - a "well-moderate" Ensor -
seems to come especially the ambiguity of the combination
between the somehow violent imagery, with caustic flashes
of sarcasm, and the tenderness of the shaded, refined,
precious chromatism. Also from the expressionist atmosphere
seems to be extracted the topic of the perceptible composition
which presents a procession with many personages, hallucinating
parable concentrating all the dramas of a hypothetical
inquisitorial universe. Documents of a singular sensibility
for the shadowy areas of the imaginary, Camelia Crisan's
visions impose a coherent and original figurative system
in the plastic arts of the generation of the eighties.
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Franco Battachi
"Teniamolli d'occhio" TV3 RAI
VENEZIA 1992
CAMELIA CRISAN-MATEI, born in a region of Romania in
1954, is the revelation of the Venetian artistic season.
Her works were always considered with suspicion during
Ceausescu's regime. Even Alenzin, only after having
overcome many difficulties, succeeded in organizing
this exhibition. The manager Alenzin celebrated the
artist's presence in his gallery by organizing a cello
recital of Bach music played by Sanda Gutu. Wise figures,
but especially sad, arise confused from mysterious paintings;
theatre curtains or winding sheets? A mob of prisoners,
sick people and pariah get in and out of desolating
rooms, agitate by gymnastics movements. The same characters
sketched on a wall with hanging naked feet, other figures
are suspended in a fragile texture and remain beneath
in an unstable and totally uncertain equilibrium. The
crowd remains united and sad around straw in a distressingly
empty barn. Consequently you are no longer surprised
that the sanguinary centurions of the regime considered
this conational of theirs with an attitude of reserve;
there is nothing more eloquent and moving than the faint
weeping of poetry.
Pavel Susara
Artists in Half-Light
Camelia Crisan Matei, a Witness and an Agent Provocateur
In a scenery-like world, animated by curtains, scenic effects and gratings that individualize and divide spaces, Camelia Crisan Matei's characters are equivocal actors playing an equally ambiguous part. Spectral anatomies, if the paradox can be accepted, moved by unknown abyssal mechanisms, lacking references to and justifications in the context, emerge from nowhere, summarily perform a senseless ritual, then melt in a hopeless collectivism. The individual is repeated, his identity vanishes as being swallowed by the multiplication beast, the amorphous creeps in and thrives until it reaches the grotesque. Without nightmarish contractions, obvious in the apocalyptic imagery, and without the merry easiness of the folk epos, these scenarios flow from Eden to History and develop the entropic path from Creation to creature. With her firm touch, paying attention to the materiality of colour and particularly interested in crepuscular tones, having a high capacity for shape individualization, Camelia Crisan Matei is a witness and an agent provocateur at the same time. In an apparent neutrality at first, she contemplates the great spectacle of decay, the failure resulting in the rhetoric of a useless effort and the loneliness in a hostile cosmos; then she transfers everything into the moral register and validates disorder and existential suffering as inevitable steps towards a spiritual reconstruction. The grotesque theatre and the mundane circus, with all their stereotype movement and the whole swarming of faces, attitudes and outward expressions, are just a half of the world, its lower part whose master is matter with all its momentary inconsistencies, caprices and ecstasies.
On the other side, in the spiritual mirror that the painter passes over the face of this world, vulnerabilities and contortions disappear, the mutilating strains are resorbed. The mob of naked bodies becomes a group of saints, the anatomical stereotyping changes into hieratism and the whole expression of the faces is confined to the eyes. The touch itself is more translucent, the chromatic substance evaporates, and the line, the point, the transparent emulsions appear instead. The heavy vision, charged with the immanence saps, and ultimately, typical of a painter's eye, is radically replaced with a graphic artist's vision. The void gets an overwhelming weight, air circulates freely through interstices and the musicality of compositions, with its impalpable rhythms, excites the ether and prepares it for the meeting with the great harmonies. From matter to sign, from painting to radiography, from observation to aspiration and from sin to redemption - this is a moral itinerary and a possible definition of Camelia Crisan Matei's art.
Georg Aescht
K. K. 872/July 25, 1993/22
Romanian art has not exhausted its metaphysical spirit despite the constant attacks of the present on the time left, a fact which is also proved by Camelia Crisan Matei's works. In this artist's case, the critic is tempted to use phrases, sentences and opinions of expressionist, even existentialist, origin; one feels like speaking of man's being thrown in the world, of the history of sufferings. The sufferings of a people, of a culture, looming in these oil paintings that become figurative ensembles of religious depth.
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