Jecza Gallery presents “În ghicitură”, a painting and drawing exhibition featuring works by Constantin Flondor.
“I can state unequivocally: the way artist Constantin Flondor relates to art is the breviary of a superior form of maieutic that re-teaches, simply, the true purpose of nature.

To the conviction that he might hold a key to decipher hidden meanings, the artist responds bewilderingly: “For me, painting means managing powerlessness”. Suddenly, Constantin Flondor, the great Master of painting and serenity, places himself alongside ordinary people: “I have almost never been conscious of knowing or over-knowing. Helplessness was closer. Like a kind of stage fright. But I fed on wonder, the need for knowledge, the joy of something new.”

Here, then, is the key: amazement. To look at the world as if you were its first witness… Flondor sees the world in its entirety, as a great whole, from which only occasionally, signs that must be captured drip. The artist positions himself in the interval between what truly is and the little we can access, the trace “that transmits diaphanously, transparently, a mystery” – the divination.

In this sense, the divination the artist speaks of is the sensitive intuition of the mystery, the transmission of a spirit in the face of whose unattainable magnitude, apophatically, the painter can only express his helplessness. This “helplessness” takes on the garb of painting, of art in general.

To understand this sensitive transfer, the painter comes with an allegorical explanation: “the sunlight, when passing through thousands of water droplets, turns into a rainbow. The rainbow is the sun’s divination, the trace it leaves for us, the earthlings.”

I asked him how an artist can capture the ineffable of a moment filled with celestial grace, how he can fix the fleeting beauty of the passing moment? In response, he invoked the same few essential things that “build”: first, the gaze full of wonder, and then, listening. An important step, for it unlocks meanings from within, those hidden beyond the surface of things. Contemplation is the act that places sight on the ladder of knowledge.

“The world is a garden, and the painter is a geometer. Contemplation leads me towards breath, translucence, listening. (…). Under listening, the hidden reveals itself. The gardener himself composes a text under the divine pen. Hence the transparency of the garden. Its spirit-vision. The garden presents itself like a honeycomb, and the passing of the painter-gardener, like that of a taster.”

Through contemplation, the visible becomes transparent to the artist, a divination, revealing the geometry of the world that manifests in all – clouds, gardens, skies, the delicate snowflake. This is the first path on which the artist has embarked, mastering the vocabulary of the visible world.

The reward he then receives is the revelation of the totality: “… I move between heaven and earth… But I am content with the mystery of the fragment. The part testifies to the whole. Pars pro toto”. Taking the small snowflake in his hand, the painter sees, as in a crystal ball, the universe.

The crystal ball-divination. This is the Painting of Constantin Flondor.

Constantin Flondor, the reflective artist, intellectual, with a profound consciousness of the act of creation, places himself in relation to the world he encodes in painting within the horizon of unpretentious ingenuity, penetrated by humility, akin to the “delicate painter” or the peasant painter, profoundly faithful…”

*** Text by Sorina Jecza following a dialogue with Constantin Flondor.

The exhibition can be visited at Jecza Gallery until February 19, 2024. Visiting hours: Tuesday – Saturday: 11:00 AM – 7:00 PM.