1. Cover: Fortified City 1986 Oil on canvas 150 X 150 cm
2. Starry Sky 1951 Oil on wood 76 X 89 cm
3. Composition 1952 Watercolor, pencil on paper 27 X 42 cm
In 1990, at a time when the image of our country in the world was disastrous, I accepted the invitation to present an exhibition Brâncuşi at the Gagosian Gallery in New York, hoping that the world would see that we are in fact something else than it could have been. believe then.
The exhibition, which includes only six sculptures by the great artist, entitled Brancusi, Masterpieces from Romanian Museums, was a huge success and a full page in The New York Times, the article by renowned critic John Russell, Praise for small exhibitions, emphasizing their importance, when they are significant, like ours, as opposed to mammoth exhibitions, which often do not say much.
The three shows I did with Rareş Bogdan at the beginning of December last year on Realitatea TV, in which we talked about Constantin Brâncuşi, Salvador Dali, Horia Damian, broke all audience records, so they were resumed for three hours in a row on the evening of the second day of Christmas.
Those shows gave courage to an enthusiast coming down from the majestic hills of Bukovina, Ovidiu Obreja, to suggest this event to me. Then Pierre Larousse's words came to mind: "Je sème à tout vent". So we inaugurate this small exhibition, full of significance, on the very day when Horia Damian would have turned 96 years old.
* The landscape of 1936, when Horia was only 14 years old, gives the measure of his genius as a painter (9).
Arriving in Paris in 1946, at the age of 24, he leaves behind in Bucharest the masterpieces I presented in 2009 at the Mogosoaia Palace, and understands that the course of art in the world is different, as it happened to Brâncuşi in 1904. Like him, Damian from that moment on refuses to represent appearances, seeking to express what is beyond the visible horizon, to enter the invisible.
For this he had to define his own language, which happened in 1951, as Brâncuşi had made his own weapons in 1907.
In his heroic approach, which would not coincide with that of the art of the time, Damian would be a loner, whom I had been allowed to stand with since 1967, when he had just returned from Malakara, at the first to visit in search of the sources of the great teachings of Eternal India; and, among my long-forgotten documents, I recently found the French translation we made of the sacred book together. Bhagavad Gita, The Divine Song. In 1968, we prefaced his exhibition at the Stadler Gallery in Paris, taking the daring, successful initiative of making his work known in the world's major museums.
The great loners, André Malraux tells us, often have a deep connection with the living and the dead, in whose name they express themselves. That is why I believe not only in the art of Damian, to which I dedicated myself with absolute determination, but I also believe in its great posthumous destiny.
In other words, if the art of the time tended and tends to focus on the object, to the detriment of the subject, Damian would remain on the pre-modern path of the relationship between subject and object, expressing the greatness and nature of being, always tempted by the mystery of experience and knowledge.
If the language of his art Damian defines it in 1951 - followed by a period of immense success, when he romantically paints the splendor of the sky - in 1964, with the first Golden Pyramid (6), the great artist transposes his cosmic vision in terms of rigorous geometry, of monumentality, brought to life, so to speak, by an irrepressible metaphysical pulsation. It will be the case of his great architectural constructions, paintings and drawings The fortified city (1), the city of Alexander, Mastaba, Mandala, and so on.
4. 1976: Damian covering with 380,000 spheres of 14 mm diameter each Hill (2 x 4.70 x 12.60 m) that was to be exhibited in New York in the fall of that year
5. Colina and a series of gouaches and drawings in the Damian exhibition at The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1976. Later, with the friendly support of the great architect Philip Johnson, Mies Van der Rohe's successor, I installed Colina on the Esplanade of at Seagram's Building on Park Avenue, bringing something of our mioritic space to the heart of New York. In that context, on October 14, 1976, we launched the New York Manifesto, evoking the supremacy of the spiritual over the storm.
Starry sky since 1951 (2), a symbol of the sacred order of the Universe, it is built according to the point, which is also the center. The watercolor from 1952 brings to attention the circle (3), the development of the point, a symbol of perfection, homogeneity and celestial unity. The sphere (4), in turn, development in space of the point and the circle, is a symbol of absolute perfection, representing the Cosmos as a whole. And the multitude of small spheres arranged on well-defined paths in the works that begin with The large starry parallelepiped of 1970, of a night blue, exhibited by me in 1972 at the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris, as in the case of the Hill of 1976 (5), meant an inspired and infinite multiplication of light sources, increasing "by a thousand or the "beauty" of the work, to use Plato's words. All this will happily compete for decades in defining, between metaphysics and monumentality, the visionary cosmogony of Horia Damian.
If, for example, Mondrian's search for his own plastic language served him well, Damian's thinking about existence and art would find entirely different sources: Sumerian art and Egyptian art, for example.
Gilgamesh's poem - the first masterpiece of universal literature, the oldest poem of all time, written a millennium and a half before Homer - would be for him an opportunity for long reflection.
The story of the young King-Demigod of Uruk, beautiful and whimsical beyond measure, the rivalry and then the brotherhood with Enkidu, the meeting with the immortal Utnapishtim, who tells our hero to accept death, because he can not avoid it, all this was read by Damian in the key spiritual. The king, who became wise and good, would reign no less than 126 years. And the great poem, Gilgamesh's poem, would enjoy in the 50s of the last century the sublime illustrations of Horia Damian, masterpieces never revealed to the public until now.
If pyramid, in its integrity, as we have demonstrated in the case Brâncuşi's column, is meant to define the ratio between one and multiple, and if Damian's first pyramid, from 1964, is just a stepped pyramid that rises to a certain level, like Djeser's pyramid, it is still a symbol of rise.
And, moreover, it is Golden Pyramid, that is, from the most precious metal, which also symbolizes absolute perfection, being considered of a divine, solar, royal nature.
As The Golden Gate (7) of 1967, the threshold that separates and unites one world from another, the known unknown, the light of darkness, the transition from the profane to the sacred realm. Gate: a theme that will often be repeated by Damian, as an invitation to participate in the mystery, this - for example - in the great painted relief, composed of nine parts and entitled The Decline of Chaos, a work of inexpressible dramatic intensity, exhibited by me at Document from Kassel in 1992, or in that Blue gate on a white background from 1999, of supreme grace, which I exhibited in 2002 at the Karsten Greve Gallery, while Horia was hospitalized in a clinic outside Paris, where I visited him daily, comforting them as much as possible. suffering, telling him how the installation of the exhibition was going.
In that context, the images of the works of his last years are shocking, the vast painted reliefs representing in a way his own loneliness, whether we are talking about The sleeping knight, marked by a red sign indicating eternal life, by The Miracle, the Ascension, or Empty bed (8), forerunner of the departure from this world of an artist of astonishing talent, dedicated to art as a manifestation of sacredness, of an artist depository of the immemorial values of humanity, whose unjust destiny darkened his memory in the last part of his life.
Radu Varia
6. Golden Pyramid 1964 Polyester, acrylic on wood 12.4 x 10.2 cm
7. Golden Gate 1967 Polyester, acrylic on wood 22.5 x 15.5 cm
8. Bed II 2001 Wood, canvas, nails, acrylic on wooden panel 226 x 250 x 8.5 cm
9. Landscape 1936 Oil on cardboard 23 x 25.5 cm
Damian event - 96, reflected in the media:
ArtLine.ro - The most beautiful Romanians
EvenimentulZilei.ro - HORIA DAMIAN - 96. Alexandra's Gallery invites you to an extraordinary event
RomaniaLibera.ro - Horia Damian - 96 The great loner of the 20th century
(list being updated)
