Petre Statu - Between reason and dream

Painting has always been divided between Architecture and Dream.

Sebastian Roberto Matta

In a world in a permanent state of collective risk, painting is an individual risk. The artist risks initiating a process of visual communication over which he can only have partial control.

He decides to convey coded messages in a graphic language about hidden thoughts and feelings to a heterogeneous public that is always on the lookout for something else, without being able to anticipate their reaction.

Petre Statu does so with this exhibition. His surrealist painting communicates impressions from somewhere between reason and dream, where the subconscious becomes conscious and takes on fantastic contours, where the surprising surprises no one and unanswered questions are answered.

In the absence of the control exercised by reason, the artist, trained as an architect, lets his imagination run free and daydreams - a strange world where built and living matter meet and intertwine in a drunkenness of shapes and color... - in which the architectural element becomes vegetal, the human - animal, and then everything becomes immaterial, strange, and yet close.

What matters in the surrealist painting is not the pure aesthetic preoccupation, but the psychological document, the search for the self and its place in one's own fantasy.

I like, in Petre Statu's painting, the mixture of playful playfulness and sad irony that transcends the stories he tells.

I like the wisdom of the owl-man, the serenity of the elephant-man, the steadfastness of the dog-man and the cunning of the unicorn-man.

I like the soft shapes that melt chromatically and flow naturally.

I like precisely the pleasure of the metamorphosed character who is comfortable in his new skin.

And as Giorgio De Chirico said in 1912 - What could I like if not enigmas? - I like the challenge that his paintings give me to decipher the enigma behind the image.

And there's something else I like. For all of us who have experienced individual and collective protest in different ways, Petre Statu's painting - who dares to dream like this, in a hugely pragmatic reality in which the subculture eats us alive - is the most authentic form of protest.