Daniel Stancu

   Daniel Stancu’s plastic creation is divided, at first view, in two big areas: one regarding easel painting and the other is what it is called traditionally icon. It is said “at first view” because a closer look will show that these two areas are merging, so in the end, they cannot be one without the other.
    His “easel” painting has been developing during time in several major themes: the house, the mystical shirt and the cup. His main themes are classical ones and were used across time by many others known artists. The neo-orthodox trend developed in Romania through its representative artists in Romanian culture, artists who seemed to exhaust these subjects, hence making it difficult to find a new approach to these themes. Daniel Stancu had the determination to try and say his own personal opinion regarding these subjects using plastic arts.
     For him the house represents a peaceful place but also a fortress. In the first case “the house” is used as mean to be in nature and to speak with it, it shows a bridge which makes the connection between a man and all that is surrounding him, remaining a personal centre of the world. Together with the representation in which he chooses painting as a modality of work he inserts installations which seem close to what conceptual art proposed. So the house is composed of modules – cubes- and the roof detaches from these parts and transforms into a triangle. The other way of seeing is as a fortress. It contains the house lifting it on the last level becoming a stronghold which doesn’t close but raises it. A dialog with the house has, naturally, the well placed in the near vicinity. If it is represented all by itself the well becomes an axis mundi competing with the centre given by the house.
        The mystical shirt represents, in Daniel Stancu’s paintings, monk’s cloth. The artist sees this as composed of three ‘wings’, two in front and one in the back, which are represented in his own vision. This cloth is considered by him not a mean of hiding but an interface between the one who is wearing it and the world. It is not a ‘ray cloth’ but it goes beyond the functional. The cloth is exposed using an installation in a house yard, house brought from Berbesti, of the Village Museum in Bucharest. The cloth, as an object this time, is made of a sack which covers an old trunk used in the past as a cereal depositor – maybe grain, symbol of rebirth. A ladder comes out of the trunk. The cloth covers a holy grave, but the meaning of it is not death but rebirth.
       The cup of Daniel Stancu is a ‘gift carrier’. The offering is represented through cups with eye, cups with wings, belt cups. This can be thought also to what the artist refers which is the sound cup also known as a bell. Passing from the easel painting to his object ‘icons’ with the explanation that Daniel Stancu does not consider himself as an ‘icon’ artist but an artist who takes parts of the icons by reading them into his objects. In his developing years his contact with the details of the religious painting had a major impact on his vision as a graphical artist. Passionate when regarding the conceptual perfection and orthodox icon execution the artist wanted to find a way of transposing them in present without transforming them through interpretation. Playing, in what himself calls “his alternative objects”, with bits from icons, bits from sacred texts – from which the viewer cannot understand – he tries to propose a new way of understanding based on the sensibility and opening for artistic beauty.
       Daniel Stancu has the courage to propose today, in a moment in which these seems antiquated , the returning to what is beauty in art.
       Although the technique used for painting the sacred figures is traditional, the support on which he works is unconventional. So the portraits come from old objects found by the artist which belong to a forgotten time in the past: bolter, stave, planks from a fence, different pieces from wedding trunks or from waving looms. Daniel Stancu selects the objects depending on what they suggest in the moment that they are transposed in art. The bolter becomes a wing, the stave a module, a cell, the planks remind him of solitary monks. In each object he uses the primary form in order to determine the composition because he considers that a dialog has to exist between image, the old object and the new one. What in the beginning can be recognized by icon is, in reality, an object which can become sacred depending on the modality that a viewer sees it.
       Seeing the painting and the alternative objects of Daniel Stancu it can be expected on what it follows, which is the implication in another alternative project. The artist had been following for a year, through photography and sketches a land art work made by children on a river bank.
       He named the work Children’s Stronghold and tried to find in it the meanings which are far from those who made it. It can also be seen as a way to get closer to their work. The photos of a cross dug in the ground constituted the documentation for the cartoon series named “Flow”. The intention of the artist in this project is rather more conceptual, wanting to find once more the major themes, like earth, -in which the construction was placed, the water- which floods sometimes – carrier of time message and movement of these surprised by the photo camera.
       All his interventions are unitary demonstrating continuity from the graphical and visionary points of view.
        It is important to understand his works by looking and trying, as an audience, a dialog with the objects like Daniel Stancu tried to experiment during their creation.

Laura Sima