Radu Șerban

Radu Şerban is a visual and multimedia artist. He is both a citizen of Romania and Canada. He graduated The Fine Arts University in Bucharest, Painting Department (1987).
Since 1990, Radu Şerban is employed as lecturer to University of Art and Design from Cluj-Napoca, Romania. In 2006 he was granted a doctoral degree in Visual Arts. The artist organized 30 solo shows in Canada, U.S.A., Italy and Romania.

“The dynamics of his personal schedule, apparently marked by the motto ”ora et labora”, his attentive and reflexive nature, his plus of intelligence, creativity and surprising originality with each new exhibition made Radu Şerban an artist from whom we can expect the revelation through art of still hidden meanings of our human experience.” Călin Stegerean, director of Cluj-Napoca Art Museum

“Radu Serban is an image researcher himself. In his representation, the multiple reality is as complex as the images’ reality. Research in painting is on the edge: having to radically paint a last image. Radu Serban is aware of the fact that society can easily turn its loyalty from one aesthetic manner to another. The joy towards painting and the special interest showed for, in Radu Serban’s case, lyrical abstraction, remains an essay for better times. A well known German theorist, Wilhelm Worringer, considers abstraction like an imense need for silence. Radu Serban’s psychological approach induced in this exhibition is, in fact, an imense need for silence.” Liviana Dan, Contemporary Art Gallery curator, Brukenthal Museum, Sibiu 

Artist Statement

I believe that my artistic activity over the past twenty years can be easily framed by this concept – Transappearance – because it brings together certain terms of experiencing reality (the lived experience): discovery, amazement, happiness, fulfillment, obsession and the terms of experiencing the visual language: synthesis, reformulation, adequateness, spontaneity, gesture, re-becoming, and playfulness.

The works in this catalogue have been grouped in seven distinct cycles, according to the time when they were created, the stylistics of the images and the employed technical solutions. In the succession of works, the Final Image is extremely varied based on the difference in dimensions (from very small to very large formats), primary material (wood, paper, canvas), technique (from traditional ones, such as egg-emulsion painting on prepared wooden board, to present-day ones, such as digital animation and digital print), and style (from a strong figurative decanted character, to allusive abstraction) of each individual artwork.