36. Heralds [2022]

Felix Aftene's works describe a hybrid world populated by a wide range of allegorical characters. "The Book of Imaginary Beings", written by Jorge Luis Borges, inspires him in outlining archetypal characters that often populate the human subconscious. The artist flips through his childhood-inspired journal and lays down, this time pictorially, whole pages of dreams or memories. Felix Aftene is a collector of senses that can be transposed into art and a metaphysical visionary who tends to implant in his canvases an atemporal universe. He captures especially the "spiritual valences of man - man and music, man and theater" and proposes a decipherment in a mythological key of the postmodern beings he illustrates. Aftene is the artist constantly in search of new shapes and lines, thus rejecting the classicism that would only rust his canvases. He achieves a masterful sounding of the abyss and depicts the human body as a temple. He elongates, widens or flattens the silhouettes of his protagonists and gives man a primordial place in his painting. The dreamlike universe of ancient myths and folk traditions is transposed into the harmonious relationship between seraphic figures and representations of the animal and vegetable order. The mannerism that encourages reverie is enhanced by the metaphysical representation of the specificity of human beings, and the levitation of the characters proposed by the artist reminds of the surrealist flight of Marc Chagall's protagonists. The artist adheres to the theories proposed by existentialists and transforms them into art. He transcribes his dreams from memory onto paper and then onto canvas. The recurring blue in his works refers to the blue of Voroneț and also to the geographical placement of his childhood. The blue appears in Aftene through an oxymoronic association between flight and fall, and by the antithetical juxtaposition of the energy and enthusiasm of electrifying accents with the more soothing strokes abundant in calm and melancholy. Felix Aftene makes portraits of ephemeral travellers and is always in search of new ways to illustrate lines and shapes. His characters are deeply connected to music or theater. The flute song, recurring in his works, proposes a magical, transcendental musicality and subtly summarizes aspects of nature and rural life. The ecstatic theatricality of the compositions is transposed into harmonious rhythms of chromaticism and compositional organization. Aftene's "Heralds", exemplified in a wide series, rich in meanings, reveal the complexity of the human being and the most representative archetypal symbols for the artist.

References

"Felix Aftene" Catalog, Performantica Publishing House, Iasi, 2010. "Felix Aftene. Architectures of Memory," Polirom Publishing House, Iasi, 2016. CHITUȚĂ, Alexandru Constantin, "Felix Aftene. Us and Them, a look at the world of animals", National Brukenthal Museum Publishing House, Sibiu, 2022.

Dimensions

width 90 cm, height 90 cm

Description

acrilic pe pânză, signed and dated at the bottom, in black, "Felix Aftene, (20)22"; signed, dated and titled on the back, in black, "Felix Aftene, 2022, Harbingers"

Dating

2022

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