In his new exhibition “Closeness and Distance from Nature", organized by AnnArt Gallery, Ioan Iacob presents a series of recent oil paintings, individualized by a particular interest in nature. The artist, who said in an interview five years ago that "abstract and figurative still intersect today, in a muted way, in my painting", looks at nature in a visual exercise that goes beyond landscape as a traditional genre, trying to understand the mystery or "spirit" hidden behind the particular/accidental/random forms that his all-knowing eye has inevitably confronted.
The sources of inspiration are diverse, bringing together various "views", preserved and amalgam-mated in the painter's memory, such as landscapes from Transylvania, the Bărăgan, the Danube marshes, the banks of the Rhine or the Basque Country. From this perspective, the titles of the paintings are significant, forming a subjective map of "impressions" gathered from the stays and peregrinations accumulated in recent years, in which precise locations (Pond in Dumbrăveni) dialog with the evocation of a whole (Field of rape), a detail (Birch) or a fragment (Birch trunk) taken from nature. There is only one allusion to the great tradition of European landscape painting (W.L.'s House), in which one can read a discreet homage to Constable.
Begun in 2020 with four small compositions relieving the haptic density of the birch trunk (Birch trunk 1-4), this year's series of pictorial compositions is characterized by an artistic project that explicitly explores the proximity to and distancing from nature. Thus, comparing the works in two distinct cycles - Night on Earth and Fallen Birch - the effectiveness of the dialog of the distinct points of view cultivated by the painter is striking: the distant view (Fernsicht) in the first and the close view (Nahsicht) in the second. Thus, "Night on Earth" seems to embody a spectral vision in which forms are essentialized, suggesting rather a frightening universe or, in other words, a generic nature threatened by an imminent catastrophe. On the contrary, "The Fallen Birch", through the force of the fragment and the consciously cultivated detail, explicitly depicts the drama of nature that has fallen victim to human intervention. The fallen tree is the tree cut down and killed by a tool/the human hand. However, the two cycles meet in an ecological message in which I read a cry of alarm, expressed by the artist with his specific means, more specifically through the expressive power of color. Let's not forget that Ioan Iacob is a great colorist, considering that "every color has its own life. An extraordinary life that manifests itself in an indescribable light".
It should also be recalled that Ioan Iacob was always attentive to the "dignity of the motif", painting those fragments of nature that contain the "picturesque" element in the etymological sense of the word, that is to say, an object worthy of being represented. From this point of view, it could be said that he ultimately takes on the landscape, understood, however, as an 'emblematic document', capable, as the sociologist Danny Trom has said, of ‘rendering present' scenes from history that remain largely alive today, and his pictorial gesture thus restores the value of the 'real' landscape.
At moments of maximum visual concentration, the series of 21 paintings brought together in this exhibition reveal that quality defined a century ago by Georg Simmel as Stimmung, which designates the tonality or atmosphere of the landscape: "where we really see a landscape and not an aggregate of natural objects, we have a work of art in statu nascendi".
I end these notes with a remembrance: when I met Iacob in Berlin (in 2001) our conversation (also) centered on our shared interest in the German painter Hans von Marées, who said that "sehen lernen ist alles". Learning to see is everything. This is, finally, also the message that Ioan Iacob conveys to us through his admirable pictorial exercise.

Ruxandra Demetrescu

Curator