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Text and Time - Constantin Severin

Symbols, lines, surfaces, spaces. All the humanity is made of misterious symbols. And Constantin Severin uses them to write a new language of art. A language made of concepts, feelings, colours and emotions.

Constantin travels in the past, in the acient times and dimensions, to return in our present and tell about the possible futures. About the next lines of expression, to describe the present, drawing the future with past symbols. His own symbols.

Luca Curci, http://www.lucacurci.com/art/index.html




Constantin Severin is the Romanian creator and theorist of a new concept on the contemporary art scene, Archetypal Expressionism. A member of the Writers' Union of Romania, he is a journalist, writer and art critic, and has published nearly 30 art reviews and articles, as well as several books of poetry. In addition to numerous awards and honors, he is also a UNESCO Ambassador of euro-integration through art.

Max Sindell
Author Liaison & Community Coordinator, Red Room Omnimedia Corporation

www.redroom.com Where the writers are.

''Constantin Severin is a theorist and practitioner of archetypal expressionism. His paintings restore the primitive, ingenuous and vitalist echoes of archaic cultural traditions (such as the Cucuteni culture and Scandinavian art) with an exceptional sense of exoticism and bookish decorativeness. Through this orientation, as well as through a lyricism and intellectual tension, Severin follows in the footsteps of illustrious Romanian artists such as Brancusi, Apostu, Tuculescu, Cotos and Maitec. The archetypal figures introduced into his paintings seem to be as haphazard and inexplicable as life itself; they appear on the canvas as quotations of polychrome and monochrome images. The organization of these canvasses by way of the repetition and variation of images and strong colors, as well as monochromatic technique, reminds us of musical rather than literary practice. These technical elements imitate a rhythm of direct perception, whereas the texts that accompany the visual images introduce an ineffable non-figurative figuration. This rhythm creates the impression of a plenitude, of an unusual accomplishment, of a movement and a sense of resurrection, which obey the geometrical laws of plane forms and loci, not the laws of space mimetically conventionalized by the rules of perspective. Line, circle and spiral are the elements through which the painter creates and gives rhythm to his world, which embodies light itself, beyond all forms, be they manifest or discrete, corpuscular or undulating (...)''.(Sabina FINARU, ''Crai Nou'', Suceava, March 2006)


In literary and visual expression, but perhaps most
notably in his clear-sighted theory of our present condition,Constantin Severin is breaking new ground. The concept of "Post-Literature" (which he has articulated in an article accessible at http://www.inst.at/trans/14Nr/severin14.htm)reveals him as one of the most original of contemporary thinkers concerning the nature of creative activity and the
self-transformation that it is currently undergoing.

One would be missing something important not to know of what Severin (situated of all places in Suceava, Romania)is up to. Take a look at the article, then search the web for
his reductively symbolic paintings, which are on the verge of forging a new post-modern vocabulary from modernist precedent and nativist tradition. As western Europe declines,
esthetically, morally, politically, something apparently is happening in Eastern Europe, and Severin is a part of it.

Madison MORRISON

(...)Beide Orientierungsmomente die farbintensive Volkskunst und die archetypischen praehistorischen Umrissfiguren, ''Urbilder'' oder ''Urformen'' menschlicher Darstellung, haben fur Konstantin auch etwas mit kulureller Identitaet zu tun, wobei auch die klassische Moderne bekannter Weise Anregungen in der Abstraktions-und Ausdrucksfaehigkeit kykladischer und vor allem expressiver afrikanischer Kunst fand und sich Konstantin sich damit auch in diese Tradition stellt.
Was den Bildern Konstantins zu eigen ist, ist die expressive Farbintensitaet, die ihre Wurzel in der rumaenischen Volkskunst besitzt.Dabei betreibt Konstantin auch eine klar definierte, bildaufbauende und ausdrucksstarke Falbfeld-Malerei.(...)

Dr. Brigitte MORITZ

Photo(left) by Sabina Burla, 2007

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