A Lucid Avant-Gardist

If compared with the gallery of traditional artists, Mihai TARUS is a nonconformist one. Using subtle techniques he deepens the spirit of Russian avant-garde in his works, a trend that proved to be so productive on the European scale. The choice of this difficult path has promised and secured him with salvation from routine, avoidance of banality and common places, and, may be, in spite of the apparently restrictive formula, it has granted him a perfect spiritual freedom. From this perspective, his "adventure" acquires a deep aesthetic and moral meaning.

The details of the formation of Mihai TARUS' personality are well known: he had attended and graduated "Al. Plamadeala" School of Fine Arts in Chisinau, and, later on, the Academy of Fine Arts in Sankt-Petersburg. Of course, the rigors of a well watched academy could not possibly be comfortable, but this certainly had its advantages as well: a thorough study of forms, a consistency in efforts, and, moreover, the attendance of a prominent artistic environment with inestimable museum values. It was in this environment that Mihai TARUS met Vladimir Sterligov (1904-1973), disciple and successor of Kazimir Malevich, who had developed the original plastic principle of "cup-dome". After the death of his mentor, whom he had "clandestinely" followed, Mihai TARUS remains attached to the group of Sterligov's followers, frequenting the studio of Tatiana Glebov. By participating in various exhibitions, Mihai TARUS has secured to himself a privileged place among the artists with innovating concepts and accomplishments.

Although unitary as a whole, the works of Mihai TARUS have developed in well-outlined cycles under various themes, still having, of course, sensitive affinities among themselves. Lately - as he himself confesses - the artist avoids evolution and any changes of state (even the motivated ones) preferring a free, aleatory, unrestricted by any conveniences expression. Whether we want it or not, the logic tempts didacticism. His irrepressible, creative fervor, permanently open to novelty, rejects the trap of predictability. Being an artist with a strong inner program (to which he owes his self-confidence in attacking any new creation), Mihai TARUS manifests himself in an extremely free, detached and astonishing language. It looks like Mihai TARUS senses, more than others, the dangers of incarceration, ossification and stagnation. He is the artist, I would like to think, who came to suspect the possibility itself of the involuntary sliding in one's own image - slogan.

In the conventional meaning of the word, Mihai TARUS has never been a realist. Even in his cubist "Still Life" of 1971, as well as in those of 1991 (also with glass / motives that first appeared in Europe in the paintings of Giorgio Morandi), where he experiments the melting of form in time, the sense of indispensability imposes itself with authority. He does not use the art of representation, but, invokes, suggests the concreteness of reality through abstracting. It is interesting to observe how, for some decades, the artist oscillates, in his gentle, tamed geometry, between pure non-figuration and the memory of some landscapes, flowers, emblematic music projections. Mihai TARUS does not feel the act of diving into reality or non-reality as a dramatic and irreconcilable discontinuance as many avant-gardists at the beginning of our century did. Secret, underground, but vital effluvia give life to the inanimate, making the geometry feel, ache or triumph. The miracle is technical, but spiritual first of all.

There are stages in Mihail TARUS' s works that can mislead a common onlooker when the artist adopts the behavior of a scientist, preoccupied by the delicacy of strictly plastic analysis, which narrows the angle of common understanding. A stage of those mentioned above is the one in which he practices the shift of visuality in time. The attempt is daring, as time cannot be illustrated. Unlike futurists, who show duration through forms in movement, in his many works Mihai TARUS develops different hypostases of a form, the influence of time on it. The static effect presumes mental mechanics, which makes the time perceptible even when categorized as philosophic. Therefore, he proposes the term of COMPRESSED TIME. You can shoot a bird, but you cannot shoot its flight, which is related to metaphysics.

The artist accomplishes his theoretic program through the disintegration of form and its reintegration in a new order. I am talking about the aesthetics of construction through deconstruction, which points out the continuation of form, its pulsating qualities, the vibration of "age". The artist tries to embrace, through a daring engagement of ideas, contrary tensions: the aspiration of a form to rest in the amorphous and the dream of the latter to become form. Life is born out of the combination of geology with biology. These preoccupations nature a painting based on rhythms, on majestic simplicity and visual eloquence, which do not slide in easy decorative solutions. Therefore, the imagination tends to a symbolics, which engages intelligence and appeals to culture.

I would dare make a supposition: through an abstract idea of time, Mihai TARUS avoids the historic time with all its psychological, political and subjective-sentimental connotations which would engage one in the "formality" of one's contemporaneousness. Otherwise said, the strictness and the risks, which he assumes, are an emphatic proof of his superb obstinacy to remain just an artist in a serene solitude, cured by phantoms unknown to his work.

His scholarly complications (which should be systematized and stated in written form one day, as those of so many other avant-gardists were) are sometimes related, sometimes not, to the recoil in front of a mean, chaotic, ignoble present. Mihai TARUS had always chosen high aims, soaring at an appreciable spiritual altitude. The development of a personal style when using the "cup-dome" symbol introduced by Sterligov, certifies the predispositions of the artist to think and rationalize. He explores the conceptual discovery of the fundamental signs of offering, to the relation between earth and sky, of the sacred hidden in profane and vice versa. Of course, in a reductionist way, we can talk about the necessity of discovering a full of virtues architecture of a universe that is avid of correspondences, connections.

Despite of the concentration of his art, Mihai TARUS is extremely diverse. He is involved in many different hypostases without betraying his self. The synthetic perspective, the rigor of treatment, which always emphasizes the compositional and chromatic equilibrium, the "don't know" what instinct of the accomplished in any new plastic construction - these all give coherence to his works. I am tempted to explain the unity of his art through the powerful structure and the plastic language he uses. He inevitably "speaks" a unique, educated language that includes numerous victories of the modern and contemporary art, which are more ample than those of the Russian suprematism (in the echo of which his artistic personality was formed). No matter what technique he uses (gypsum and color, carton and color, collage) the visual effects are congruent to the level of his personal style, the instinct and the reason perfectly serving his objectives. The accuracy and expressiveness of form bring to light a perfectionist.

Anyone could notice an amazing phenomenon: in Mihai TARUS's paintings the divergences agree with themselves in a natural way and not artificially or through agony. The austerity of his works, the objectivity of his ego, and everything else up to the illusion of a dry detaching coexist with cordial tonalities of a great picturesque sensitivity, which irradiates an ideal, heavenly environment. In this vague and innocent Eden, the world, being liberated of the weight of materiality, becomes either air or liquid, the forms levitating in a magic space. The numerous works entitled "Forms Flying", remind me strongly of some of Constantin Brincusi's drawings because of their closeness of state. I am not talking about vertical gushes here, but about slow, airy horizontal rotations. In his somewhat rough and concise approach, Mihai TARUS takes upon himself "the secondary game" of evocation, of contemplative availabilities. This is where I like to discover his Moldovan fiber.

The artist rejects point-black the inherited visions together with their entire escort of tics. But he does not choose the path of a brutal and painful discontinuance, in both the framework of art and that of existence. An elegant and delicate ignorance takes the place of the shocking protest, of fervent negation. The nihilistic impulses of the revolutionist are softened by a strange, conservative impulse. The sense of equilibrium, the taste of peace associates the necessity of change with its determined and simultaneous consolidation. Mihai TARUS disassembles only in order to build, without irritation, without vainglorious plans, without rhetorical gestures. He is one of the lucid, serious, motivated avant-gardists who understand art and the vocation of the artist from a larger and more integral perspective.

I wonder if he does not illustrate a classical structure in the epoch of the mostly agitated modernity. The classic man, in his non-historic essence, tends to conciliate the divergences, to discipline them, to ally reason with feeling, intelligence with fantasy, the critical spirit with contemplative aspirations. His works are a coincidentia oppositorum in rhythm and images. In them, the idea wraps passion, plasticity - the musical bustle, while freedom and necessity are always reconciled. Thus, we can view Mihai TARUS as a classical nature connected to the sensitivity of his time, knowing that, of all determinations of art, sensitivity is the most fragile and perishable, but also the one that bestows genuineness on the artistic expression and the chance of a frank, non-falsified dialogue with the world he came from.