Radu erban, November 1st 2010 TransAppearences was initially the title of a digital animation I created in 2005, in fact

a meditation-essay on the world we live in, on the mystery of light and life. It was both a glance in times mirror and in the mirror of a window set in the wooden wall of a church. The visual project was built around certain elements bearing philosophical, religious and symbolic meaning: light, life, water, mirror, window and icon, pretexts for inducing an introspective state, a meditation on ones self and on ones relation to the world. Transappearance refers to a newly-created world with a specific spiritual reality, in which the referent object is transposed in an autonomous image, without a narrative support. The transappearance can also be the background game, the game of the mind that operates with artistic concepts, the ineffable game of feelings and is, of course, in the same time, the game of language. I believe that my artistic activity over the past twenty years can be easily framed by this concept, because it brings together certain terms of experiencing reality (the lived experience): discovery, amazement, happiness, fulfillment, obsession and the terms of experiencing the visual language: synthesis, reformulation, adequateness, spontaneity, gesture, re-becoming, and playfulness. The works in this catalogue have been grouped in seven distinct cycles, according to the time when they were created, the stylistics of the images and the employed technical solutions. In the succession of works, the Final Image is extremely varied based on the difference in dimensions (from very small to very large formats), primary material (wood, paper, canvas), technique (from traditional ones, such as egg-emulsion painting on prepared wooden board, to present-day ones, such as digital animation and digital print), and style (from a strong figurative decanted character, to allusive abstraction) of each individual artwork.

Clin Stegerean, director of Cluj-Napoca Art Museum

At the time of change in Romanias political paradigm in the end of year 1989, Radu erban was preoccupated in the direction of a painting that explored the means of expressing a spirituality foreign to the official art, one referring to the pictorial structures of wall painting religious art in Bucovina, in the technique of egg tempera, typical for icons on wood. The following years lead to the maturing of these means and the approach of a direction interfluent up to a point with the neo-orthodox expression trend that became noted in Bucharest during the 90s. Radu erban nevertheless maintained a certain distance against this trend by turning to a non-manifest figurativeness rather expressed through

formal allusions than through an artistic epiphany of a religious inventory of themes. In the same time, the new social and political conditions after 1989 allowed him access to cultural areas fundamental to his artistic development, such as his research stays in Italy (1995) and Spain (1996), or his long Canadian sojourn (1997-2000). Gradually, the human figure lost in corporeal consistency, the artist bringing into play contaminations with the icons created in Nicula and naive art, incorporating an ingenuity that brings his characters closer to the candor in childrens drawings. They do not remain isolated in this component because the human figure is associated to other elements that incorporate it in rustic universes or populate various spaces associated to previous themes (Byzantium), abandoning two-dimensional surfaces and invading the territory of objects in space, on the surfaces of which they relate to largely plastic components. No matter the cycles to which they can be associated (The Woman, Imagined Portraits), his human figures gradually acquire a second-degree role, both as meaning and in importance in the visual field, in favor of the surfaces general composition that aims increasingly at revealing a discourse of shapes and colors holding plastic value in themselves. Therefore, in his last cycles of works (The Patina of the Wall, Invented Landscapes), the human figure gradually evaporates or simply disappears, making way for a visual spectacle whose aim can even be that of integrating the human being in an existential amalgam that leads, eventually, to its actual disappearance. The disappearance of the human figure from the telluric coordinates coincides with the artists approach of a new theme Unidentified Characters through the means of digital photography techniques and computer animation. This spiritual dimension is nevertheless rather signaled by the certainty of a presence, of a double, of an immaterial stalker that the physical light of the projector ideatically supports, than by a relation mainly instituted through ones adherence to a set of religious practices. The dynamics of his personal schedule, apparently marked by the motto ''ora et labora'', his attentive and reflexive nature, his plus of intelligence, creativity and surprising originality with each new exhibition made Radu e rban an artist from whom we can expect the revelation through art of still hidden meanings of our human experience. Liviana Dan, Contemporary Art Gallery curator, Brukenthal Museum, Sibiu ... Radu Serban is an image researcher himself. In his representation, the multiple reality is as complex as the images reality. Research in painting is on the edge: having to radically paint a last image. Radu Serban is aware of the fact that society can easily turn its loyalty from one aesthetic manner to another. The joy towards painting and the special interest showed for, in Radu Serbans case, lyrical abstraction, remains an essay for better times. A well known German theorist, Wilhelm Worringer, considers

abstraction like an imense need for silence. Radu Serbans psychological approach induced in this exhibition is, in fact, an imense need for silence. (speech for Radu Serbans opening at the Imagined Places, Things and Faces exhibition, UAP Gallery, Sibiu, 2009)
Livia Dragoi, PhD Director of the Cluj-Napoca Art Museum

Radu Serban belongs to a generation which, somewhat programatically, somewhat ostentatiously, showed a marked evolution in the last two decades in a fertile postmodern experimental space. In this space, where he moves with a certain composed discretion, Radu Serban has slowly and steadily defined a territory of his own. This has been achieved by ordering his entire protean creation around a stable and irradiating nucleus: his vocation as a painter who is gifted with a peculiar sensitivity, poetic and reflexive in its nostalgic source. A refined colourist and a virtuoso of drawing, the artist is also tempted by the technical possibilities of the new media. He creates unusual hybrid objects through an inventive mix of media, techniques and languages. His voyages in the multi- and intermedial area and in the fusions of traditional and unconventional, modern media remain, however, complementary to his passionate investigations in his main field: painting. They are, in fact, opportunities to expand, within an integrating approach, the artistic issues specific to the universe of his painting. Beyond the ingenious manipulations of digital images with new techniques, languages and artistic codes belonging to various fields (visual arts, film, music), the integrating postmodernist vocation, specific to the artists vision, can be seen in his way of approaching tradition, by subjectively assuming (through memory and remembering) some of the eternal values from the heritage of the Romanian culture and civilisation. This type of subjective archeology steadily favours the Transylvanian village staple of the artists childhood and adolescence, an affection-laden formative topos, which introduces in his creation motives and archetypal themes of discreet symbolic or metaphorical relevance. It also determines a positioning of the author in an existential horison which is infused by the sacred. This is a space which is carefully ordered by rules established through the long experience of individual and community life, allowing the discovery and cultivation of ones own interior world according to the characteristics of the Romanian peasants soul: the authentic thrill of the sacred, the longing for cleanliness and absolution, the joy of living in harmony with nature... Discovering, through remembrance, his connection with this universe, the artist gives priority to

one of its main coordinates, light. It is the source of life and vision, and of moral truth and justice, the energetic exponent of the supreme Presence which is beyond what can be seen. This is either diffuse light, which, in the wait for the descending transcendence, crowns, protects, soothes, elevates and redeems, or active light, which, together with coloured matter and drawing, builds shapes and images, or changes them perpetually when mirrored in the water. In other words, light becomes the decisive factor in the spectacular marriage of reality and dream, of truth and phantasm, of concrete and abstract, leading to an authentic, vibrant and persuasive spritualising of vision.

Ramona NOVICOV, art critic

Painting as body and fallow field - a dark, dense and sealed place which needs to be ploughed deeply, over and over again in order to reveal once more its particles of light. That is why image as concevied by Radu Serban, can only be created through reversible routes, descent - ascent, crypt - throne, gate - shield, hearth - cupola. The pictorial space is a closed one, dark and mysterious, yet the forms which it contains are protected, often by a pristine background, wavelike as virgin canvas. Sometimes these forms become so personified that they detach themselves from the rigidity of their protective space to stand singular and volatile as if they were the wings of a fragile altar. Lightly sketched, such forms allow themselves to become protected only by the warmth of the wood of the old destructured assemblages. With a sensitive presence, delicate and yet monumental, the painters forms advance vertically towards a purely interior space; an outpost barely still visible, a times at the boundary between here and there. Luminous and warm these forms rise like a cupola, like dough, tending to grow in their fullness to fill, the entire space within which they are contained. Sometimes this expansion of interiority leads the two dimensional image towards an objectivized state wherein its formal Limit becomes extremely sensitive. The purity, suppleness and amplitude of the forms is supported by a painting technique of privileged plasticity. The artist employs, in a modern yet thorought rigorous manner, the time honoured iconographic technique of painting in egg tempera, laden with spirituality. The matte velvet lustre of the tempera enables a brush stroke to attain a tender expressivness, rapidly attenuated yet still preserved in the chromatic vibration of its texture. This explains why the art of Radu Serban has a pronounced votiv character. His images often appear to be "worshipping or offering, controled by the transmundane hierarchy, while the painter himself demonstrates that he is a witness who never ceases to seek the optimal form of introspection. Thus the palimpsest of his message has a

Testament as its primordial text. In the spirit of this message, the painters figures are solitary, having a virginlike and contemplative presence. They have a shadowy gaze calligraphically traced with descending lines which amplify their melancholic expressiveness, bearing the slightly amazed peace of thouse who have passed the ordeal of their tribulations. Wide open eyes and sealed mouths underline the fact that contemplation is purely introspective. Beyond the silence of these figures the epidermic pulse and rustling of the painters medium animates the richness of the image. Radu Serban knows and senses all of this, he is touched by a yearning for that luminous Distance, deep and high like the darkness of a well that reflects the stars of midday. He realizes that to paint a world in which material is constructed verticaly is to feverishly and yet faithfuly await the moment, when as the prophet said, Your light will arise from the dark, and your darkness shall become the light of the day.
Alexandru Vlad, poet and writer

Radu Serban uses in his art two coordonates: reference and particularization or carving. Reference towards an iconic art, an art of the traditional Romanian icons with its Byzantine origin, its special script and its well-known aesthetic His proposition is the carving, which is of an amazing modernity. If the reference is esoteric, then carving is of a modern and personal esoterism. Inside this carving lays his proposition for modernity. Here lays a modern understanding of space. If Byzantine art is a passage that leads towards perfection, which, as Sorin Dumitrecu, was already reached by predecessors, this carving is what Radu Serban proposes and leads it on its own way. Its a plastic re-reading, a postmodernism, a use of reference in a modern way. Things overlap later like in a palimpsest; in some works, colour, the suggestion of summer, of an old wall, of a time-consumed colour; but, generally, I would mention and underline that this carving is the window from which I saw this artists modernity.

TV show at TV Cluj, October 1993 Pavel Suar, art critic

Painting as a spiritual exercise Radu Serban is completely detached from the strict problems of language (problems that absorb most of his generations colleagues) and, second, he manages to integrate in the most unobtrusive area of contemporary Romanian painting, in whose shadow two great melancholists watch Florin Mitroi and Ilie Boca. This vein of the Romanian art, frail at first sight, but of great spiritual stamina, entails some defining coordonates: the absence of any kind of ostentatiousness, the harsh selection of the expressive means, the unsterile beauty and the almost mystic obiedence to the object His vision has a Byzantine filiation, but in a way that exclude outer landmarks. Regarding this path, only the images spirit can be distinguished, as well as the compozitional grimness and the objects evanescence. The image used in the composition, regardless of the real nature of the object, calls up the artists participatory sensitivity in a way that makes it receive the entire authority of the portrait. In fact, all works offer a hidden portraiture, even if in the immediate expression they convey a human face, a bowl or an apple. Despite the intuition of the spiritual load of objects and their registration in a record of plastic thinking, Radu Serban tackles painting by selecting his means in a severe, austere way. His canvases become transparent through the ethereal of brush traces, and colour loses any material quality. The registry of tones doesnt reach over brown, ocher or English red, and the neutral backgrounds create wide veils on which compositions clot in a sensitive way that hides both knowledge and effort. This great capacity of observing, almost in an oriental way, the common soul of things and of plastically expressing it along with its entire moral load, reveals one of the young painters greatest qualities. published in the Cultural Observer, Bucharest, October 1991

Mircea oca, art critic Radu Serban Painting and drawing exhibition

Radu Serban is a modern artist because he doesnt make any discrimiantion between genres. He doesnt set borders between them. He creates art. And he does it with inspiration, under the gifted, fruitful signs of the emotion and thinking happily joint with feeling. But the young painter and drawer is a modern artist also due to his abstracting, due to the way he decreases the plastic language to its basic components, and because of how he purges expression in order to translate it into signs the already reduced to the core forms. No matter how modern, on a closer look, through all these, Radu Serban is actually subscribing into the prestigious tradition of the Romanian vintage stylization, which

spreads from the famous Moldavian frescos of Stefan the Great and Petru Rares age to Dimitrie Paciureas Madona Stolojan. As an excuse for the subtle black and white interpretations, some of these elements have fresco fragments and orthodox worship objects with a worthy, ancestral character. These, and I underline this, are just excuses for figuration. Radu Serban starts from them with enthuziasm, boldness, but also with cleverness and skill in order to create compositions with a high level of rigor and with complex, admirable and inspired layouts, that represent not only components, but main characters of the plastic discourse. In this Transylvanian fruitful, autumn afternoons peace, I have attended the plastic, chromatic, and graphic discourse of the exceptional, unmistakable compositions that wear the signature of an artist of real and original talent, that is Radu Serban. This discourse reminded me of another afternoon, this time a Toscan one, when, while sitting in a Romanic church, I have attended a Bach-music organ concert. It is with the organs sound that the phrasings and rythms of Radu Serbans recent painting and drawing resemble. published in the Adevarul de Cluj, Cluj-Napoca, October 1993. Mircea Petean, editor, poet and writer Beyond the threshold Far from being headed with iron, Radu Serbans gates dont close unless they are opening and they are open to protect, inside the space of a static and severe interior, the traces of sacredness which translates into both objects and faces, perceived personally but also in the extension of a century-old tradition as poses of some miraculous moments of a Christian mythology that is fixed in the framing of ancientry. The Gate of all gates. Through it, one can enter Radu Serbans art like entering a wood church from Maramures. A space of Self-retrieval. And of Absolute. Space of Revelation, of consecutive discoveries, and of a balance given by the consciousness of belonging to a reeking world, behind which archetypes exist and productively act. Archetypes that belong to a living Christianity, one that is experienced in the immediate and direct act of life. His artistic work is characterized by a great resource frugality. Simplicity and refinement. A discretion that reaches the edges of the most pure humility, imprisonment and abasement. A subtle revelation of an inside that palpates its abyss. Radu Serbans draw-signs are the work of a scrupulous craftsman who miraculously knows how to give depth and relief to the insignificant surface of the paper. They are also the work of a gifted artist: scratching the roughness of the concrete, he discovers traces of an ancient writing, which he amazingly amazement that goes beyong astonishment which, consequently, becomes a vertigo - knows how to replay its lost significancies. His art has something from the fascination of a palimpsest.

Mircea Petean, Draw-signs of Radu Serban exhibition catalogue, Cluj-Napoca, October 1996