Page 11 - The Decameon On 100 Etchings by Petru Russu - A Homage to Giovani Boccaccio

Petru Russu Visited by Boccaccio and intensifies the theme of death as eros’s shadow from the
Boccaccian text. That bawdy atmosphere from the Italian’s tales,
The artist, with a vibrant vitality, though traversed by voltaic recounted by the artist as he relishes narrating his pieces, is
currents of inquiry, experiences a dialectical tension resolvable here suppressed and replaced by a fundamental confrontation
only through talent: a tension between an imperative creative between death and regeneration, as in agrarian mythologies
instinct and an indispensable awareness (a cerebralization). from the Nile to the Indus, from the Far East to the heights of
the Andes.

Structurally, Petru is exemplary of the generation to which I believe
I also belong “the angry young men,” seeking the exhaustion of Freed from any physiognomic determination, stripped of the
irrepressible energies and, simultaneously, the shaking of inertias social trappings of costume, the figures re-enact spectacular
through the refined revalorization of expressionist gesture. The poses of ritual couples (Osiris–Iris, or the furious possession
ongoing agitation of the spirit, the pendulation between technical of Shiva by the goddess Kali). With the stylistic absorbency I
zones (painting, drawing, printmaking, object), his literary and mentioned earlier, Petru instinctively constructs an implacable
musical affinities, and his spectacularly constructed external “bibliographic argument.”
persona - all reinforce this claim.
The images evoke, through incisive drawing and vivid color,
As does his consciousness of value, affirmed at times with the erotic and somber ceramics of the Mochica culture, refined
a naive force, not of the individual’s worth, but of the artistic Tantric pictograms, meticulous and raw depictions of erotic
object he creates, and toward which he adopts an attitude of prints, as well as Tarot figures or as subtly noted by a lady,
ecstatic wonder, meaningful in his relationship with the Work. sumptuous sailor tattoos, thus revealing the solid hidden link
Petru possesses, I would say, a mediumistic personality: he does uniting fundamental attitudes across time and space.
not explore culture, but is visited by cultural illuminations; he
does not dominate a subject, but is possessed by it. So Petru’s works are not cultural demonstrations but lived
experiences, revealed along the path of reading and, in parallel,
A kind of superior shamanism defines his connection to a through the expressionist inquiry into “primitive” aesthetics.
rich cultural heritage, received and reworked into coherent
significance. Giovanni Boccaccio, then Lucius Apuleius or I’ll conclude with a bibliographic cliché. In Boccaccio’s Decameron,
the Marquis de Sade are not used as snobbish pretexts for a ten youths perform, despite the plague as a symbol of death,
pre-structured discourse, but become gravitational centers, an erotic and courtly ballet across the alleys and chambers of a
crystallization points of impulses from an inspiration that fears villa in Fiesole. In Petru Russu’s Decameron, the ethical mutation
its own abundance, serving as the soothing rationale for the introduced by Marcel Duchamp through his “bachelor machines”
exorcism of obsessive phenomena through imagery. concept and metaphor for incurable solitude and the inexorable
mechanics of death, transforms that ballet into a puppet play,
Regarding The Decameron, I shall confine myself to self- brutally enacted on the chessboard of abstract (yet expressionist)
quotation, referencing ideas I voiced during an inspired jam confrontation: that of the Knight and his eternal counterpart.
session held among Petru’s works, in Timisoara, together with
Writing by Calin Dan, art critic, essayist, editor of Arta magazine,
my friend Coriolan Babeti. Petru Russu’s Decameron extracts managers of MNAC /The National Museum of Contemporary Art of Romania.
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