Radu Şerban, 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 time’s 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 one’s self and on one’s 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.