Studio Portrait

Sorin Ilfoveanu’s showcase at AnnArt continues with the great artist’s fifth solo show, Studio Portrait, with recent works dating 2019 – 2020.

The selection of 23 acrylic on canvas works explores themes favored by the painter – static nature and portraits – whose expressive significance is deepened by the subtle calligraphy of lines and unexpected chromatic incursions. 

The show Studio Portrait is accompanied by a video message from Sorin Ilfoveanu and a short essay by art critic Aurelia Mocanu.

The show will be kicking off in the unusual context of pandemic restrictions – and as a result there will be no public opening, but the exhibition can be visited during the regular hours the gallery remains open for the public. Photos of the displayed works can be found here.

"On refined backgrounds of chromatic vibration, Ilfoveanu turns lineage into a controlled reverie with acute in lilac-cerulean-coral tones. He does not waste time in probing the age of the drawing under the painting. The canvases are drawn by imaginarily visiting each other, starting from the drawing desk, which has remained faithful to the painter for decades.

Superbly synthetic, the recent images are those fluent picto-calligraphies with a panopticon of archaic characters, animated by the complicity of a living being. They are creatures drawn in the brush, like a contour-enchantment, with the effect of intriguing or reassuring the hieratical and merciful human.

Around the Ilfoveanu rustics, the vital can be summarized in bouquet indices in splashes or in lines, like a garden furrow. For Nature is deeply bookish in the painter's imagination. She is also propped up in the studio setting: fruits, game-birds and, yet again, in the background - drawing-from drawing.

"The altar table of a prolong wedding", the recent motif, that of the hearth on which to make the pictures, is as interrogative and confessional as a diary. Self-portrait of the studio, with a large spot centered in black, as in the cave of icons." (Aurelia Mocanu)