Nelu Pascu Recensioni

How do we become who we are?
Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo

When asked the question whether painting be a profession, a vocation, an occupation, Nelu Pascu´s answer came without hesitation: “A necessity.” He is one of those rare practitioners of his art who is in love with the materiality of is craft, the subsubstance of painting itself. Standing before a painting of Nelu Pascu we always seem to find ourselves face to face with the dismembered parts of an accomplished fact, as if viewing the topoghaphy of a familiar landsscape from an aerial view, whereupon are evident the arduous daily labors of the artist´s hand which have entered into the plowing of fields, the wielding of traditional instruments in the service of new fields. Here the harvest is not for bodily sustenance, but for the mind´s eye.

“There is a bowl of soup, cigarettes, tables and chairs, behind every work of art”, the poet but also brilliant critic Jean Cocteau once observed, regarding his friend Picasso. In this way he arrived at an accurate description of the process from the commonplace circumstances of artistic creation, the back-story, as it were, of the artist´s humdrum routine in quest of his vision: the bringing to life of that which, in times to come, will end up on the wall of a museum or in the bric a brac of the flea market.

Meanwhile, the artist spends his day as he sees fit. What constitutes the principle pleasure, the prime satisfaction for the viewer whose eyes come to rest on the end of the day´s result, remains exactly this: a sort of play-back of the process itself, how the painting was executed step by step, a vicarious reconstruction of the accumulated creative decisions which were undertaken because they were more meaningful than others, and therefore rewarding to reconstruct after the fact by that ever-anonymous viewer. The rules of the game of oblivion and eternity, in which Nelu Pascu engages with alacrity.

The occasion of the painter occurs within the time span of the hours of the day, but also within the perspective of precedence, the long patrimony of his art. “Poetry requires the best hours of the day”, the poet Swinburne observed, but for the artist the shadow on the sundial measures not only hours but also centuries. For this reason the artist´s time is more precious than that of others.

The locality of Nelu Pascu´s painterly endeavors can be situated in several scenes: Galati, Padova, Venezia, Arles, Barcelona, London, as well as at his home base in Milan. Yet its locality in time is equally placed in the specific perimeters of the study of his predecessors, of moral example and artistic inspiration, the anthological remix of the cyclical Eternal Return until leading to individual apotheosis of temporal associations, to echo back and forth with finely nuanced reverberations. Nelu Pascu´s dialugue with hisancestors as with the contemporary artists is an ongoing interchange, a solo performance on the same ancient instrument of those who came before him and those among whom he works. While the painter may be thinking of Dubuffet or Burri, he is also ever mindful of the antiquity of his craft.

The occasion or event of the musician or the actor in the theater arrives simultaneously with the occasion of his audience; the occasion of the painter, on the other hand, is a phenomenon of a more complex nature. There is a lag, a delay, in the transmission. Does the painter´s occasion occur in the course of the creation of the work? In its finalization? Or, in the brief intercourse of the hours from its first presentation in an exhibition? Or else perhaps in the moment of its private acquisition, after which it may disappear from the public eye for decades, into the closed world of the collector or into the intermittent visibility of museums. La vie étrange des objet, as Maurice Rheims has so memorably termed the autonomous nomadism of art works across continents and oceans, but also across centuries. Nelu Pascu confronts this high challenge with exuberant courage. One could easily see him as a Fifteenth Century court painter, a soldier of artistic fortune.

Voyage, play, necessity: The epic narratives of antiquity involve displacement-from Homer´s Odyssey to Dante´s Commedia, while the modern novel can arrive at an epic intimacy in the departure from parlor to vestibule. The painter operates on a different itinerary. Recreation is a strange word, to re-create, the idea of mimicking creation, remaking it, as a game. Relaxation, vacation, recess, pause, but from what? Gardens in urban cement; labor, e-laboration. Each day the painter engages in this game of metaphisical re-cration. “To live in the world of creation”, wrote the novelist Henry James, “to get into it and to stay in it, to frequent it and to haunt it, to woo combinations and inspirations into being by a depth and continuity and meditation: this is the only thing”.

Necessity implies the basic requirements of life, but also the need of the hand, which must turn itself to a task no matter how idle, the ankle impatient to dance, the imagination to turn the tongue to tell tall tales-what the anthropologist Leo Frobenius called Sagtrieb, the drive to speak. The necessity of expression, as vital as the urge for horses to run: the necessity for painters to move wet pigment on a flat surface.

“I began painting as a game which became a necessity”, Nelu Pascu has declared, as re ported by the writen Daniela Ambrosio. It is like acquiring a passion for roulette, or for the game of chess. Nelu Pascu was born in Cosmesti in Romania, in 1963. After his inquisitive spirit instilled in him a passion for literature and philosophy, he began to paint in 1990, thanks to the encouragement and advice of the artist David Sava, dedicating three years to the study of drawing with Gheorghe Miron. In the mid-90´s, he moved to Padova, Italy, where is real advenure as an artist began.

Art in the last twenty years has undergone great modifications, from conceptualist experimentation, interventions of photographic and cybernetic technologies, dematerialization of the object, and the merger of pictorial art with theatrical space. The old battle between the figuarative and the abstract was overtaken by the displacement of picturing or materializing. Yet despite all prophesies that photography would bring about the extinction of the handmade art object, what instead we have witnessed is the undeniable proof of the stubborn resilience, the necessity, of tradition means.

The writer Peter Handke once said that he “must learn to love single words the way Cézanne loved color”. Nelu Pascu would seem to have been born a Fauve, with an innate love for color, as were Vlaminck or Derain before him. Pascu´s maretiality of color on surface found in is work recalls Hans Hofmann, and later, Alberto Burri who, like Tapies, presents this materiality as a thing in and unto itself, not as ulterior allegory. Materia prima, not nouvelle cuisine on canvas. Recent voyages to that great city of artists, the Barcelona of Picasso, Mirò, Tapies as reinforced Pascu´s in born sensibility for color, and brought new inspiration through first contact with the work of Gaudì.

“Simple storytelling becomes quickly outdated”, the painter Fernand Léger once said. A mentor of Nelu Pascu, professor Ioan Tudor, “Never seek out the secrets of painting in painting”. While many young painters, especially the recent graduates from italian academies, have attempted a compromise between painting and photography in a stale remake of Hyper Realism with science fiction overtones, Nelu Pascu has had the wisdom to stick to his guns, focusing his creativity on a higher challenge: that of coaxing new combinations from a tight spectrum of color and form, holding himself to the classic quests of modernism. This comes as a welcome relief in a time when many painters are content to make pictures fit for calendars.

Nelu Pascu thus finds himself at a particularly fertile period in aesthetic history, but also in a moment which might easily intimidate less audacious aspirants. Yet it is the vigorous spirit of his very origins which is evident in the very fiber of his work, and this is what allows him to brave the day. Romania is one of the richest cultural contexts in the Occident, set at the very crossroads of modernism, and Nelu Pascu was fortune that fate decreed it to be is place of birth. The land which knew the great poet Ovid, and in modern times was to be the birthplace of great artists and writers from Brancusi to Cioran. The vortex of Provence comes to mind as paragon, or the central Italian regions of Umbria and Tuscany: places where ancient seeds have flowered in new gardens: Locality and Latinity.

If Brancusi found inspiration in the simplicity of traditional Romanian wood-carving, the abstract heritage of modernism could be said to have a kinship with the emblematic art of heraldry. Heraldry represents an ancient and complex grammar of pre-alphabetical emblems, like the visual vocabulary of handwoven peasant fabrics. Such insignias, like the singboards of a café “At the Sing of the Golden Bear”, communicate with picture rather than word, represent textbook examples to demonstrate the fundamental nature of abstraction as distinct from figuration, the signifier and the signified: the abstract field of painting.

While Nelu Pascu may seem to palce major emphasis on this mediation of symbols without metaphor or aphorism, it is immediately obvious to the beholder that the artist relishes the physicality of the objects in and unto themselves. If is execution in paint is Dionysian, the final allegiance is to the Apollonian. Painterly depiction in the service of religious faith or philosophical creed would seem in opposition to an art intent on no more than the celebration of material itself. (Is belief the most important requirement for a painter of sacred immages?) The “message” of Picasso´s Guernica or a domestic scene by Matisse? “I know a work is completed”, wrote Georges Braque, “when I have eradicated the idea”. Such is the high goal which Nelu Pascu has set for himself, and the sure sign that he accoplishes what he has set out to do occurs when, confronted with his work, after having assimilated his geo-aesthetic passions in all their intensity, we grow aware of the mute beauty of the object in and unto itself.

The great American poet Ezra Pound, a friend of Constantin Brancusi during his Paris years, underlined again and again the maxim “art is local”. This locality contains at once our origins and our destinations, our aspirations and, above all, our sensibility. The work of Nelu Pascu once more demonstrates that this locality is within the artist himself.

Alan Jones, Milano - 2009
 

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