Beyond the threshold







Far from being headed with iron, Radu Serban’s gates don’t 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 Serban’s 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 Serban’s “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

Translated by Gaby Brezean