104. Étoile

Ion Ţuculescu’s approach to painting was like “the revelation of a miracle”, according to his own confessions. It was only just after his large retrospective exhibition at Dalles Hall in 1965 that his work would obtain national recognition and reach a high point at the Venice Bienniale in 1966. Ion Ţuculescu’s painting is striking through its exceptional chromatic fusions, and it is by means of this sense of intensity that they are engraved in our visual memory. It is a magical phenomenon and not an instance of optical violence when one can find alongside, on the same canvas, a palette made up of red, blue and green. This kind of magic can be found in “Étoile”, an artwork that belongs to the artist’s last period of creation, when he depicts exclusively the imaginary view of his own creative ego. Trying to interpret artworks from this period is like trying to enter the fantastic circuit of his values, of his symbols, trying to follow their baffling and vertiginous rhythms, to pose oneself in a state of mind and try to live it as intensily as possible. The layers of eyes suggest bizzare sections in an animated content, solar explosions; they become lenses through which one can see irrational phenomena; they become mirrors, circles and magical ellipses, concentrated worlds, concentric planets placed in an imaginary universe. In his last period, Ţuculescu frequently uses colours straight from the tube like a magic ritual due to the fact that the colour loses its initial ordinariness and becomes a universe itself. Green is a colour that Ţuculescu introduces in almost every painting, including the present work. He tries to find its meaning by blending it with other colours in sweet harmonies. Baconsky finds in Ţuculescu a painter of intense chromatic fusions, ressembling him to Van Gogh, but unlike the latter, Ţuculescu is a speculative and thoughtful interpreter of colours and he tempers their intensity in what one could call a ludic rite. (I.C.)

References

Baconsky, A.E, “Ion Ţuculescu”, Ed. Meridiane, Bucharest, 1972 Davidescu, Cătălin, “Ţuculescu”, Ed. Scrisul Românesc, Craiova, 1988

Dimensions

width 67.5 cm, height 56 cm, custom 67.5x56

Description

oil on canvas, signed bottom right, in black, TUC

Research information

Provenance: Stephan Roll's (Gheorghe Dinu) collection. The artwork figures in the album "Ion Ţuculescu", A.E. Baconsky, Ed. Meridiane, Bucharest, 1972, cat. 35.

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