His third solo-show at AnnArt, Levant After Levant exhibition presents the most recent series of paintings, acrylics on canvas, realized by Ilfoveanu in 2014-2015. The set is an extension in color of the worldly exploration and of the byzantine idea, which constantly mark the artist’s impressive creation.

The novelty of this series is given by the amplitude of the chromatic palette, subtly dominated by a violet presence. In spontaneous vicinities with strokes of white, ochre, green or red – this violet receives spectacular new shades, that give a vital and mysterious rustle to the composition.

I tried to keep the connection with a traditional language of the image, that comes from the fresco technique – the byzantine icon, miniature,  the archaic art from around the Mediterranean, which I molded onto my style. Tradition, as a return to the origins, on which you can start building something new. Once it enters your style, an idea becomes personal. By emerging yourself in the image of a miniature, you create the premises of an image that belongs to your style: by eliminating the crusts that sediment on the XI – XII century miniature context, you produce a new text.

The diverse fragments of a miniature become the fluid that circulates in your drawing. Setting it free by temporal limitations, makes it a present one.”

(Sorin Ilfoveanu)

Sorin Ilfoveanu confesses, in leitmotifs, the reveries occasioned by lectures with shades of history, inside which his eye deciphers a bud for drawing. Ilfoveanu has a taste for Xenophon, Virgilius, Procopius of Caesarea, Count of Mirabeau, or Yourcenar, just as he has a taste for a glass of  amber-colored Samburesti wine. The painter draws with a splendid simplicity. These are drawings with a constant economy of graphic ductus, with great linear subtlety, laid in the beginning, on preciously toned paper. A few iconographic patterns vary with subtlety a human-animal figuration, underneath which parables are offered for guessing. Chronologically, first-comers are the Knights of Arabasis and from the Arrow Parable. They are also the first motifs that stood up, from the drawing desk, and reached up to the great canvases. The knights enrich their quasi-funerary drama when the ratio is turned upside down, to light on dark. Put in drawing-painting, the images survive on large formats, and still keep the empty - full space dosage, favoring the empty, as the excellent pattern of the oriental calligraphy does.

(Aurelia Mocanu)