Born in 1948 in Feldru, RO
Lives and works in Cluj-Napoca, RO
An artist professing an undeterred admiration for the classics and deploying a painterly style that has visible affinities with the (neo)expressionists, Ioan Sbârciu actually possesses the artistic temperament of a romanticist, for whom art needs to be mysterious, daring and tensely beautiful and who hopes that artworks can be sensuous translations of states of mind and troubling feelings. However, Sbârciu is an utterly contemporary painter, as he is acutely aware of the present un-tenability of such a utopian paradigm. All these make his oeuvre both fueled by a sort of hybris and smoothened by a deep melancholia.
Sbârciu is an artist fascinated by beauty, but a beauty that stems from tension. His works are gestural and yet carefully composed, and the chromatic finesse of the painterly surfaces reveals itself fully only to the patiently scrutinizing eye, which takes the time to discover, for example, the arresting presence of dots and brushstrokes of pure color amid areas of sophisticated, colored shades of grey. He practices painting with the fervent passion and the unshakeable faith of a devotee yet scrutinizes and reflects on the contemporary potential of this venerable medium with the plain inquisitiveness of the sorcerer’s apprentice. Thus, he paints on various materials, from the habitual canvas to the delicate silk and often mixes oil paint with materials as mundane, unexpected and sensuous as sand or ash. All of Sbârciu’s works possess a monumental, dramatic dimension, but still offer a surprising subtlety, the most prominent strength of his art being precisely the ability to coherently and poignantly blend the opposites: dynamicity of composition and daintiness of chromatic juxtapositions, raw expressiveness of the painterly pigment and elaborated contrasts, forcefulness and elegance.