Alin Bozbiciu, soul's lattice

For the painter consumed by the desire to represent the world and its infinite dances, it is a genuine act of wisdom to accept that he can only ever show fragments of it.

In the solitude of his studio, Alin Bozbiciu's dreams embrace the whole universe, and yet he must explore, fix, and cut into images. This is why his works, even the largest, are ideally completed within the span of a single day, while still seeming to belong to a continuum that races furiously across space and time. Interrupted, the bodies flout the boundaries imposed by the stretcher, their angles meticulously adjusted. "If I were not a painter, I might well be a choreographer", Bozbiciu says modestly. But he is a choreographer already, just as he is a photographer, a musician, and a stage director: the maelstrom of forms and colors that meets our eyes is the finest testament to it.

Like a fiction by Jorge Luis Borges, Alin Bozbiciu's paintings have no real beginning or end; they possess their own language, and to explore them is in itself an invitation to adventure. As with any leap into the unknown, one must cling to fixed points, to reassuring forms. And so we anchor ourselves on the clearly identifiable, finely chiseled faces. Much as Balthus, before unfolding his own work, studied the old masters at length in the Louvre and in Italian basilicas, these cherished physiognomies are tirelessly studied and sketched by the painter. Without exception, they are beloved beings, tutelary figures for Bozbiciu, such as his master Cornel Brudaşcu, whose gestures he knows intimately and whom we often encounter from one canvas to the next.

It is from these familiar forms that the work unfolds: "The faces are often calm, almost sad: that is because they have more to tell me than smiling faces would; they speak to me and choose for themselves what they wish to see around them", says Alin Bozbiciu. From there, we feel our way, spiraling, yet with the precision of scholars and children, with the intuition of those who gaze at clouds and watch objects, animals, or figures take shape within them.

By degrees, the fluctuations transform, here into pieces of flesh, there into eddies or the vestiges of movement. This instinctive labor continues into color, none of which is used pure: the chromatic tones, subtly combined, manifold and harmonious, are so many crystallizations of personalities. "Now and then, I set out to introduce a new hue." Whether the yellow of a few years ago or, today, a violet more intense than usual, for him this is an incontrovertible event, an earthquake even.

There exists a dreamlike world, described by Jacques Abeille in Les Jardins Statuaires (The Statuary Gardens), where statues are not carved: they grow like trees, and one must help them unfold, remove (or not) their monstrous offshoots, and discern the moment at which these sculptures may be deemed complete. Alin Bozbiciu's gesture, like that of these imaginary sculptors, testifies at every instant to the necessity of excavation, turning each of us into Argonauts in search of forms that can stand on their own. How so? Because they form a rhizome of souls, a mesh at once visual and conceptual. Make no mistake: this is not some form of archaeology; painter and viewer each choose what is to be extracted, in order to strike the right balance between power and silence.

Forms, colors, excavation: how to reach them without light? Running counter to a certain present-day inclination to depict explicit visual markers of postmodernity, the painter's rootedness in his own era takes shape with great subtlety: witness this painting of Brudi (the affectionate diminutive he gives to Cornel Brudaşcu) gazing at the screen of his phone. Here, no object as such, but the idea of the object: an ethereal light, a directional sfumato illuminating the master's face.

As Alin Bozbiciu recalls: "Most of the scenes I depict take place indoors, and more precisely within what I call invented spaces, created by light sources placed beyond the confines of the canvas. As a student, I did paint landscapes on occasion, but, drawn more and more to difficult tasks, I brought forth these invented interior spaces, perhaps as ways of delimiting space, much like a theater stage."

Connected to artists in Cluj and around the world, Alin Bozbiciu is far from a hermit, though hermit enough to take the time to assimilate and transform. In this sense, his oeuvre should be seen not as a set of distinct stages or series, but rather as an intensely coherent continuum. Lulled by Mozart, Bach, or Paganini, familiar delineations appear and slowly dissolve across the works; and within some of them a storm occasionally breaks: a passage of violins triggers a repetition, the blare of a solitary trombone lets in a black, indeterminate shadow. By the end of the concerto's third movement, the painter secretly hopes he has managed to complete his work and to concentrate his energy.

This is, in fact, his current aspiration: "Perhaps it is time for me, including on large formats, to explore solitary figures, broad, flat fields of color, to move toward the calm, the appeased." To vanquish entropy may seem vain, even illusory, yet the path is no less promising for it. Did not Aurélie Nemours explore it in her own time, leaving Fernand Léger's studio in 1951 to pursue the marriage of black and white and the rigor of geometric abstraction?

Far from minimalism, however, Alin Bozbiciu's inspirations often arise from hypotheses of bifurcation drawn from past events, re-projected into contemporary space. Thus, for the exhibition After the Sacrifice at Galerie Untilthen in 2016, he asked: "Had there been no angel to intervene and halt the sacrifice of Isaac, would anyone have done so today? And what would have become of Caravaggio's famous canvas?"

The dances thus frozen in the series shown at Galerie Suzanne Tarasiève, though situated very precisely in the present, refer here to the macabre episode of the Bal des Ardents, which took place on 28 January 1393. During a private celebration at the Hôtel Saint-Pol, four members of the nobility, dancing wildly alongside King Charles VI, all disguised as "savages" and bound to one another, clad in fabrics and leaves fixed with resin, perished by accident, set alight by a torch brought in by the king's brother. The event caused a great stir: in part because disguise and masking were forbidden at the time, so as not to betray the form God had given to humankind, and in part because of the scandalous nature of the dance initiated by the king, whose mental health was already fragile.

Following a similar path, Alin Bozbiciu asks once again: "Had the Bal des Ardents taken place today, with a happy ending, what would we have seen in place of human torches writhing in pain? What would their lived experience have looked like?"

In a monastic calm, traversed perhaps only by the notes of Bach and Chopin, nineteen paintings carry us along, so many fragments of infinite dances.

aurèce vettier