Born in 1989, Romanian painter Alin Bozbiciu casts the shadow of many of the great masters of the past over his canvases. His fiery painting is both fast and free, expressing the urgency to paint in order to capture emotion.
Pieces of flesh, falling or dancing bodies, clutching, embracing, whirling, fluttering… Alin Bozbiciu’s painting is all whirlwinds and movement… “If I wasn’t a painter, I’d be a painter,” he says. If I weren’t a painter, I might be a choreographer,” as the Romanian artist once said, seeming to paint with a kind of urgency 1. Resembling shreds or torches, these bodies seem to be simultaneously fraying, disintegrating and forming, oscillating between form and formlessness, the life of flesh and its potential putrescence… An impression born of the rapid, unfinished brushstrokes, but also of the light, “ghostly” tones of flesh that sometimes seem almost bloodless. Cameos of cold tones, blues, purples and above all whites and greys.
DES CORPS FLAMBEAUX
Emerging from the maelstrom of brushstrokes, the truncated or contorted bodies carry a certain morbidity in their decay. Yet they are very much alive – because movement is life… – and seem ready to dissolve. A representative of the figurative painting of the Cluj School in Romania, Bozbiciu nonetheless practises figuration close to a certain abstraction. It’s a very informal form of figuration in which the shapes, as if ‘eaten’ by the background, seem to disintegrate, revealing the ghostly silhouettes of works from the past.
BODIES TORN APART AND INTERTWINED
“Here, we think of the emaciated faces and stretched bodies of El Greco; there, of Poussin’s Massacre of the Innocents; here, of Rodin’s The Gates of Hell, and there, of Tiepolo or Géricault…”. “In Alin Bozbiciu’s painting, we [also] recognise features reminiscent of his master [Cornel Brudascu, a tutelary figure for many Romanian artists], in particular the presence of almost Mannerist bodies, which tear at the same time as they intertwine, and a certain erotic darkness.” 2
- Alin Bozbiciu paints his pictures in one day, so that the emotion is not “broken”.
- Anaël Pigeat, text from the exhibition catalogue Alin Bozbiciu. “It’s by touching a bird’s feathers that I find the way to paint human skin” on show at the Galerie Suzanne Tarasiève in September 2020.
ALIN BOZBICIU – “The antlers of the soul”
Galerie Suzanne Tarasiève
7, rue Pastourelle, Paris 3e
On view until 25 November