The Mannerist Scheme

Călin Dan

Being myself involved in institutional culture, I find it difficult to write about Cătălin Bălescu’s artistic work outside the context of his exercise of authority within the realm of (academic) administration. Bălescu belongs to a “generation of transition”, formed at the breaking point between two systems and without much appetite for, or exercise of public policies. What made this particular artist interested already at a young age in the ways of institutional buildup has with no doubt multiple reasons, some more and others less interesting for the discussion at hand. But, again, it is not possible to go into the analysis of Cătălin Bălescu’s cultural practice while separating it from the strategies he put at work in adjacent sectors.

Institutional power has a distorting effect on our capacities of living and expressing freedom, two attitudes inherent to any consistent creative practice. Someone embarking in a professional trajectory cumulating art production (of any kind, in any medium and of any aesthetic choice) and a power position (of any kind as well) always raises the suspicion of opportunism. But the combination art & power should be inspected with empathy, precisely because of the high risk involved for those in question. Personally, I tend to have great respect for several of my colleagues (Cătălin Bălescu included), for their involvement with administration, because I understand the double risk taken, as both positions (artist, administrator) are mutually contaminated in the eyes of the layman. I would say that in our times of irresponsible behaviour and unaccountability at all levels of society we, creative people who try to build institutions as well, are probably among the few truly under constant public scrutiny. Would that give us a licence to make bad art (literature, music, architecture, etc.)? Of course not—but it gives us the right to be fully accountable for our parallel careers separately, and independently. Still, the ways in which they intersect remains attractive for the distant analyst.

That being said, let us return to Cătălin Bălescu’s trajectory in visual arts by getting back to the generational issue. The artist was educated and started his professional path in one of the most dire decade of post-war Romania, when the communist dictatorship had deeply affected all the processes in society. By contrast with the platoon of artists educated during the more liberal and more culture oriented atmosphere of the 1970s, and who became later acknowledged as “the ‘80s generation”, the newcomers were victims of institutional abuse manifest in the absurd so called reforms of the education processes, while being further away from the inspirational models created by the generations who contributed to the “golden thaw” (1962-1972), as their members got old, died already or emigrated. This corrupt and chaotic context, promoted cynically as “progress” by the communist propaganda of the time might be the psychoanalytical ground for Bălescu’s later obsession with institutional order and stability.

Becoming an artist in the 1980s must have been a hard and, most importantly, a marginal and lonely task, especially if compared to the precedent decennia. Cătălin Bălescu came out of that period a discrete, somehow secretive, almost saturnian presence, emanating a sense of self assurance but not giving out anything in terms of artistic trade. His work was—like in the case of other colleagues of generation— carefully avoiding a connection to the 1980s neo-expressionism, but could not avoid as well the dominance of strong colours and a somehow abrupt way of organising the surface, common in the previous decade. There is in the collection of the National Museum of Contemporary Art (MNAC Bucharest) a painting signed by Bălescu in 1994. It has a strange subtitle—Tree in My Studio I—and a flat title—Composition. I am looking at this complex (work & title) like I would look at a self-portrait. The artist is present there—and yet, not really. He is proposing to the viewer the most common category of images used in academic training (the still life composition with objects), and then jumps to an image-title that is playful and striking (the tree in the studio space).

In this game of charades, the image is adding to the confusion started with words: what we see there is an intricate network of lines and contours, holding together with difficulty a series of coloured surfaces. The tree is not there, although the trained eye might identify some tree-like qualities in the details. The whole is submitted to a de-composition treatment, meant to mislead the viewer into a figurative trip without figuration. Like an updated version of the baron living in the trees, the artist throws at us a challenge, but unlike the candid character of Italo Calvino, Cătălin Bălescu embarks on his journey animated by a rather unfriendly sense of humour. The works of this particular series are relevant to an approach that I would call “objective painting”.

Cătălin Bălescu populates his studio space with various leftovers among which the most distinguished are the fragments of fabric, while the most incongruous appear to be pieces of electric cables and of plastic nets. With this inventory he builds up unlikely still lifes that are afterwards submitted to a process of translation into image. The whole process is about the objectivity of painting, as a medium and as a dominant matter, a self-referential objectivity, comparable (I make here a daring throw of dice) to the objective nature of divinity: once you accepted its existence, the divine (in any form—including painting) functions above all other realities—in a supreme objectivity. The problem with Cătălin Bălescu’s images is that he is not a believer in their transcendent immanence, and that diffidence is communicated to the viewer in a rather blunt way. What fascinates him is precisely the trick by which the agglomeration of materials becomes image, first in the real space of the studio, then in the virtual space of the painting, where it retains a fragile but unsettling relation with the starting object.

Cătălin Bălescu left in a rather unexpected and brisk manner the formula of those “objective” images for a whole new domain of free subjectivity, that he chose to call mannerism. The transformation has been complete: the colours went from crude to (mostly) subdued, from cold to warm, distributed on surfaces that turned from flat into agitated; the compositions became explicit, translatable in a minute narrative / inventory of recognisable objects / situations; the “figures” (in the rhetoric sense) of this new series are human silhouettes, portraits, landscapes. The general atmosphere is familiar, populated with characters, sometimes minuscule and hardly legible, and with their adjacent contexts. Even in the paintings where the dominant composition is an intricate network of clouds in striking colours, brushed with bravado, there is a nucleus of figuration resiliently surviving at the level of almost hidden details. The taste for charades remains constant in Cătălin Bălescu’s work, but now it gets an ambitious label—Mannerism.

Cătălin Bălescu’s relation to mannerism is strategic, and has very little to do with the imagery, philosophy and ontological dimensions of the historical style. When the artist says in an interview that he “woke up in the state of Mannerism” he is making, besides a rather funny statement, a rather accurate one. A curious mind and a clever strategist, Cătălin Bălescu understood rather quickly that the power of investment in the exploration of abstract painting was limited. After playing with various avatars of the fold (another notorious subject in visual history), the artist looked for a different type of narrative, and a more obvious one, with that.

I would say that the choice for Mannerism as cultural reference and domain of research was well inspired, because of two reasons: first of all, it is a territory in art history that was not exploited by post-modernism, most likely due to a set of characteristics difficult to instrumentalize. Mannerism has a limited and very subtle iconic power, the personality of the style being predominantly a speculative one, based on atmosphere and nuances and very rarely connected to signatory art pieces. Cătălin Bălescu has a declared aversion for post-modernism, perceived probably as a typical feature in the profile of the “‘80s generation”, from which (as I stated above) he feels the urge of taking a tactical distance. The declarative subscription to mannerism is part of his positioning outside a movement / historical period about which the artist is uncomfortable.

Secondly, it is precisely the elusive character of historical mannerism that helps Cătălin Bălescu’s agenda, since the artist chooses this domain of reference as an antidote for a broader set of problems, already brought forth by historical modernism. Candidly, the artist expresses his reservations about both modernism and post-modernism, giving the use of mannerism as a personal solution for current checks and balances of contemporary art. But, as mannerism is less a systemic entity as a reactive system of micro-strategies, Cătălin Bălescu’s stance is more polemic than analytical, applying in undiscriminated ways to all levels of Avantgarde, kept at bay in the name of a „generic mannerism”.

With this, we are getting to the core of the matter—Cătălin Bălescu’s unique way of positioning himself as ambassador of a (almost) defunct style, in order to guarantee his own stylistic autonomy in the present day. Claiming the position of representative agent for the revival of a specific moment in (older) art history is a rather unusual way of drawing an art credo, but also a challenging breach of the protocols ruling this kind of endeavour. Usually, the manifesto artists claim what they want to bring new, next to what they want to destroy / reject. Cătălin Bălescu is not adventuring in any “future development” proposals, he is just taking distance from the present (amorphously perceived as the latest consequence of modernism), while claiming a withdrawal in a zone of complicity with the past, called mannerism.

In order to find some equivalent to this type of strategy we must go back in time to the Pre-Raphaelite moment. Where Cătălin Bălescu identifies a need to return to the lessons and solutions of Mannerism, the Pre-Raphaelites were claiming, interestingly enough, the need to go beyond Raphael and his mannerist followers, seen as the main source and reason of disorder that altered the ulterior developments of art history. This contradiction of targets should not deter us: essentially, our artist and his 19th century predecessors are suggesting their own respective medicines to varieties of the same disease. Going further with the comparison might be instructive.

The PRB (the initials for Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, added for a short period to the signatures of the fraternity members) were observing nature; Cătălin Bălescu has his back turned to it, preferring the “second nature” of the studio. The PRB were deeply spiritual; Cătălin Bălescu’s images are silent in that sense: the abundance of putti is a mere accessory within the image, their role being cultural-decorative, not religious-affirmative. The PRB despised the “painterly” painting (hence the attacks at Sir Joshua / mocked as Sir Sloshua / Reynolds, seen as the epitome of this “heresy”); Cătălin Bălescu is building his mannerist cycle around a substantial colour treatment, sometimes evocative of blown up versions of—precisely—tiny details from a Reynolds background. Of course, the comparison between one artist and a fully fledged cultural movement is asymmetric and thus vulnerable. What we should retain is the fact that art history can be revisited and even (slightly) rewritten backwards, with profitable results.

Cătălin Bălescu’s decision to go along with mannerism is not about the latest, it is against the rest. His lack of trust in the capacities of renewal, invention and generally speaking in the relevance of contemporary art and art system are actually what motivates his aesthetic choice. Like his fore-goers in the PRB, Cătălin Bălescu believes in the partial soteriology of a retrospective, magic formula. Wouldn’t that be mannerism, it could have been anything else from a past prestigious enough for putting in the right perspective the insignificance of the present. The artist has a mission, and that is proving history right and present wrong, while carving for himself a territory of serenity.

A recluse character, trying to accommodate the paradox of being in the limelight with the structural need for loneliness, Cătălin Bălescu is a discrete wanderer through the history of painting, where mannerism remains just one of several references. The other one, already mentioned, is Reynolds, but this can be expanded to all the northern colourists of the early modernism period crystallised in the 18th century under the influence of the 16th century Venetian masters, discovered through the compulsory Grand Tour of that period. Cătălin Bălescu’s “grand tour” is made of eclectic references, a sample of fragments that pays an unconscious tribute to post-modernist strategies, without acknowledging them. His obsession with clouds of red putti comes maybe from Il Rosso, the iconic mannerist painter active in Florence, but it evolves, under the pressure of consecutive historical sediments, into a feature reminding mostly the coziness of the Biedermeier style, filtered probably through a reading (spontaneous? subconscious?) of the rococo iconography. Even more fascinating from my point of view are the unexpected echoes of the decadent, fin-de-siècle (French / German / Scandinavian) symbolisms, popping up surprisingly right in the middle of otherwise rather neutral compositions. Those accidents confirm that Cătălin Bălescu is not a dogmatic proponent of his style of choice, but more of a flaneur through the offers of the past.

I will close with a few notes about the strategy applied during the preparation of Cătălin Bălescu’s show, Projections of Mannerisms. From my curatorial point of view, the main purpose was to enhance the diary-like relation the artist developed with the theme of the putti, which became an ongoing collection of subversive reports about his daily social and professional trade. If I were to keep the comparisons on English ground, where it seems that Cătălin Bălescu has (maybe unconsciously) some affinities, I would say that behind the sometimes neutral but mostly delirious aspect of putti agglomerations is hiding a critical / cynical message, energetic and frustrated like the drawings of Hogarth, for instance. Obscure recollections of recognisable people, typical characters, like in the social novels of the same 18th century, irritating situations and relationships are coded with viral humour under the varnish of this apparently gratuitous exercise of forms.

Besides the psychodrama they are conveying, the putti remain a powerful vehicle of visual emotions—especially when rendered in drawings, maybe less in the more complacent substance of the paintings. The clouds of fine, tiny networks drawn with the pencil (or charcoal) in the shape of little puffy (or deformed) children are absolutely fascinating, and I think they are the epitome of Cătălin Bălescu’s art to the day. His capacity to generate infinite surfaces of shapes that can endlessly morph into other stories or just into other forms, this freedom to play with a limited set of means provided by the history of visuality are making Cătălin Bălescu an artist at the helm of his trade. Wherever he goes from here, we will watch him with good expectations.

Both versions, Romanian and English, belong to the author.