Opening
“Figure and (Un)likeness” exhibition, hosted by the Cluj Art Museum, features two artists with particular understandings of figurative art, its expressive potential and its relevance in our present-day culture. Using traditional media, namely sculpture and painting, Darius Hulea and Sebastian Nasta’s works are significantly different in terms of imagery and visual impact, yet, they share a few essential traits: visual poignancy, the use of carefully choreographed and realistically constructed human figures and a tendency to refer to specific aesthetic ideals, revealing painstaking attention to the technical aspects of the artistic processes.
Both artists deal primarily with the tension between dual registers: that of models and that of particularities, that of metamorphosed, yet forcefully surviving ideals from the past and that of the technicism of our modern era, that of mimesis and that of expression. In other words, what is of the essence in the art of them both is the tension between building a figure and evoking a likeness, both of which are able to act upon the viewer, to move him, to fascinate him, to engage with him. In other words, what is crucial for their art is neither eidos, nor eidolon, but they form generative energeia.
Their works are eye arresting because of the paradox they embody: they both rely heavily on technique, yet deny technique its ultimate triumph. Technique only has purpose and the purpose is always efficiency. Darius Hulea and Sebastian Nasta make copious and expert use of technique, but in an almost a-technical way, at a fundamental level, as their goal is not efficiency, but richness of meaning, delivered in spectacular fashion. (Bogdan Iacob)
