About the Artist
Ovidiu Lebejoara
Thank God we are going to leave behind the so-called modern period of human history. In particular, it will be known as the most violent and contradictory period , in which man fought against his own faith, against himself. The twentieth century gave us two world wars, Bolshevik revolution, a Cold War and thousands of other “small” wars and conflicts. Art is the mirror of time, the reflection of society, isn’t it? It has expressed these contradictory times. The so-called “revolution in art” might be just a contradictory expression of “art” to fit all tastes and serve a few political ideologies.
“The Game of Life”
Can the modern product “art” called art? Does this “art” include the term “beauty”? For Plato, beauty was a opportunity to guide us to contemplate positives ideas. He held that art meant to distract citizens’ attention from real social and political problems. Art is fever of sensuality and takes away attention from spirituality, the main concept of Christianity. In the modern world, art and beauty begin to opposites. Attacking “beauty” results in a fight between aesthetic an moral values. Contemporary art, sadly, excludes the term of beauty. Art in general, is like a library with thousands of shelves and millions of books. Nobody can read them all. We can read with selective process. If we want to write a new book, we have to go back to those “old” books and refresh our minds with “new”, not very old ideas.
“The Byzantine period is an example of the past. Here the work of art is essentially a symbol and no longer a sign. It intends to express a meaning that cannot be expressed by realistic images. A Byzantine artist would not be preoccupied by a human ideal, but by divine one. He will not try to show reality, but the truth” (H. Read).
For the modern man, philosophy is religion and art is an attempt to express a mystery, which who do not have to call the truth. Selfish humans replaced faith in God with faith in them-self : “God is in Heaven, and I am God on the Earth” (Joseph Stalin). There is, in modern art an element of protest transformed in a period of transition. Transition to what? Some of us would say that we are going somewhere, not that we are going from bad to worse. The extreme forms of Dada movement, which was a declaration of spiritual bankruptcy at the beginning of World War I, and worse followed: World war II and so on… Dada made cynicism, anarchy, and rebellion into core values.
