„In search of lost mannerism” – paintings by Cătălin Bălescu, present on MNAC picture rails

Cristian-Robert Velescu

Here is a Proustian title, meant to open my considerations on the recent work of the painter Cătălin Bălescu, who for years has placed his vision and work – I would say in a postmodern spirit – under the sign of historical mannerism. I have followed his creative approach with obvious interest, through which he seeks and succeeds in finding a spiritual anchor in the cultural sediments of an era marked by decisive transformations, an era at the very roots of European modernity. I have in mind the Mannerist era. The last consistent manifestation I witnessed was the exhibition the artist opened in 2018, in Craiova, in the rooms of the Art Museum. I felt then that the fin de siècle setting – mediated by the architecture of Mihail Palace – seemed to be the ideal frame, meant to frame first a certain painting by Bălescu, and eventually the others, all of which the artist decided to present to the public in Craiova. The first one depicted – as it still does today – a mirror that does not reflect recognizable events of the „figurative reality”, but – perhaps – a piece cut out by mirroring from the cosmic darkness itself, the one we call eternal. Here is a pictorial exercise designed to delight, but also to induce something of the spirit of historical mannerism. Relying on scholarly studies, but also on the experience of a keen viewer, I realise that the style that emerged unexpectedly in the very heart of the full Renaissance probes and explores – among many other things – the reality in which we are given to recognise the very source of anxiety. In my imagination, the mirror on the picture rails of Mihail Palace was the messenger of another mirror, more celebrity-nimbed, the circular-convex one showing the young Parmigianino. So, a self-portrait. Seen relatively close up, with his left hand outstretched, the mannerist artist seems to be trying to cross the circular space of the painting to reach the real space of the viewer. So, in Craiova, there is a mirror which, in a Proustian way, awakens the memory of another mirror, nestled in what I would call „the mist of Mannerism”. In this way, perhaps without fully realising it, Cătălin Bălescu took time itself as a reliable ally. A compelled, relativized time, able to „surpass” the distance between epochs and styles.

In Craiova rooms the other images painted by Bălescu revolve around the mirror painted by Bălescu which is devoid of any representation. The painter crosses the paths of historical mannerism through them and, landing at its heart, he extracts its spiritual substance to place it in the view of the contemporary viewer.
I will now refer to the exhibition to be opened at MNAC (The National Museum of Contemporary Art of Romania). I intend to act as if the event already ended. I will allow myself the luxury of such an approach because the artist has done me the honour of sharing fragments of his project with me. I know, for example, that Mannerism will be present on the picture rails, in material form, through one or more period paintings. Here is the promise of a knowledge that takes the form of holistic embrace, able to bring into actuality an observation of William Faulkner’s wandered through his novels. Somewhere, the writer states that the moment the mere touch of the epidermis occurs, even though a mere – seemingly – handshake, the act of a knowledge closely akin to the erotic has also been accomplished. Cătălin Bălescu’s paintings are physically close to those of the mannerist era, in an embrace nothing can resist, just as nothing can be reproached. In my opinion this is a true alchemy of epochs.

One of the paintings bearing the flavour of history shows Cupid drawing his bow. If the visitor to MNAC was given the gift of ubiquity, if – in the poet’s words – “the dull substance of my flesh were thought”, then it would be easy for him to be here and there, at the Palace of Parliament, but also at the Museo di Capodimonte of Naples, and he would certainly meet not one, but two Cupids, captured in somewhat similar, yet distinct, poses. The one in Naples is seen in full activity, carving his own bow. It is a work by the same Francesco Mazzola, known as Parmigianino, already mentioned in these considerations, an emblematic artist for the Mannerist era, capable of fascinating Cătălin Bălescu and all of us alike. Just three years after Raphael’s death – an event that scholars identify with a „milestone” intended to signal the birth of Mannerism –, before setting off for Rome, Parmigianino designed a trompe-l’oeil domed pergola at Fontanellato Castle, not far from Parma. Supported by painted false lunettes, it adorns the ceiling of the „camerino” dedicated to Paola Gonzaga, the wife of the commissioner. The string of lunettes supporting the pergola gives space for Acteon to evolve, who, having surprised Diana at the bath and fallen in love, is transformed into a stag and – by the will of the goddess – torn apart by his own dogs. Could it be a mere chance that the great artists of the Mannerists, taking Michelangelo, who painted the „Ancestors of Christ” in the Sistine lunettes, also seek out – I would say deliberately – such modest, quasi-dark spaces, in order to set there the story told by the brush? Pontormo, for example, who depicts the story of Vertumnus and Pomona in the famous lunette at Poggio a Caiano, or Parmigianino at Fontanellato Castle. The latter, unable to find a real lunette in the architecture of the castle, imagines by himself – I would say in a mannerist spirit – a whole series of lunettes, all painted, of course, to house the story of Diana and Actaeon. Similarly, I think it is no mere coincidence that both Mannerist artists referred to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which became the thematic source of their creations. This is why I am struck by the idea that it is not only sacred history that interests the Mannerist artist, but above all the idea of transformation. For the Mannerist artist, Ovid’s Metamorphoses were able to fulfil a double role, that of a thematic source, to which is added that of a „manual”. By leafing through the pages of the Metamorphoses, the Mannerist artist was able to discover how transformation can be brought down from the realm of the word to the realm of the visible. That is, if we accept the adage Ut pictura poesis.

Like the mannerist artist, Cătălin Bălescu is also fascinated by the reality of transformation. His paintings can be identified with real „spaces of metamorphosis”, and their magmatic aspect only reinforces such a critical opinion, or rather certainty, adorned with the signs of firmness. The current exhibition at MNAC proves that between historical and contemporary, postmodern mannerism, a space of amenity seems to be gaining a definitive consecration. The paintings Cătălin Bălescu presents to our attention draw their beauty and sap, but also their spiritual legitimacy from historical mannerism, to which they are linked by countless invisible threads, all held together in the painter’s skilful orchestrator’s hands. The consistent effort Cătălin Bălescu pursues stylistic directions – and not only! – of historical mannerism, as if trying to reconstruct it, once directed my thoughts to Jorge Luis Borges’s writing, the one entitled Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote. Borges’ character set out to rewrite Cervantes’s novel Don Quijote de La Mancha, not by simply copying Cervantes’ text word for word, in other words, by plagiarizing his favourite author, but by matching words in the course of permutation attempts, he hoped to achieve a similar rendering of Cervantes’ famous writing. At the end of his parable, Borges states that Pierre Menard’s dream was not entirely in the category of the impossible, since in order to bring it into the real world it would have been enough to be immortal. In his attempt to reconstruct historical mannerism in contemporary space – unlike Menard –, Cătălin Bălescu sets up what I would call „strategies of sacrifice”. The painter places his talent and intelligence, and even his very being, at the foundation of his reconstructive effort. Looking at the paintings and drawings on painting rails at MNAC, one discovers strings, veritable garlands of putti flowing through the magmatic, spectral space. They are the same and yet different putti than those creeping through the green-dappled lunettes of the pergola at Fontanellato Castle. And, mutatis mutandis, so do Diana and Acteon. Although Cătălin Bălescu did not set out to paint them, it is nevertheless easy to imagine that their ineffable being has crept into the texture of the fluid spaces that greet us everywhere on the MNAC painting rails. Even if the mythical characters mentioned – and others – have eluded our gaze, a possibly cultivated visitor to the exhibition, able to pass in the course of a light conversation – as the poet says – „from Plato to Simonetta”, will be tempted to look for them and will certainly know how to find them or at least to perceive their presence indistinctly, and therefore tacitly. It should be added, however, that Cătălin Bălescu’s message is also aimed at the ordinary visitor. Constructed through science and the virtuosity of the brush, the magmatic-spectral spaces in his paintings are like ineffable nets designed to retain the mythical substance present in the works of historical mannerism. With the passage of time, this substance has become opaque or evanescent. By crossing epochs and landing in the contemporary world, the mythical bearing of the creations of historical mannerism has come to elude the perception and sensibility of the „recent man”. All that remains in his spirit is the idea of ongoing transformation, of the metamorphosis in which he allows himself to be drawn. By placing him at the heart of such a protean transformation, Cătălin Bălescu urges him to recognise the old mythical structures, or at least to perceive their echo, to appropriate them in his own way and, by participating in their energies, to become the beneficiary of their redeeming power. This could be a possible initiatory scenario that Cătălin Bălescu proposes to us, only half joking. Incidentally, Parmigianino did the same in the frescoes of the Fontanellato Castle. Not long ago, they received an interesting and – I would add – solid alchemical interpretation. If the hypothesis I have just presented is correct, the visitor to the MNAC exhibition is being offered the most precious gift that the contemporary painter can give to his fellow human beings. Without forcing them in any way, the artist allows them to wander through the spectral spaces that his painting generates. In his own discreet way, he encourages them to partake – be it indirectly or infinitesimally – of the precious mythical substance retained by the spatial structures of his paintings, the fruit, therefore, of a modern and, of course, sui-generis „Miraculous catch of fish”. The whole of European spirituality is built on such mythical substance. Cătălin Bălescu gives us genuine „mannerist engrams”, that is to say, precisely the clews the mannerist culture has deepened in its own artistic spirit. If scholars are not wrong when they say that the totality of engrams make up the reality we call memory, the visitor to MNAC is allowed to participate in the very „memory of Mannerist culture”, as it refracts itself in the spirit of a contemporary artist, to be shared with the rest of us. To quote Guillaume Apollinaire, I would say that this time too we are on the royal road „to reconcile art and the people”, the esoteric being allowed to become – through the artist’s will and assumed sacrifice – exoteric.

Cristian-Robert Velescu
Bucharest, February 2022