About Sergiu Grapa

The graphic artist Sergiu Grapă (b. 1975, Romania) successfully fits into the surrealist style, in which he asserted himself in the last 25 years of activity.

In his works, dreamlike constructions, infernal and nightmarish hypostases, Freudian allusions or mythological themes predominate. In an imaginative vision – decanted in motifs and symbols, doubled by the creative formula of computer art that essentializes the drawing with precision of detail and chromatic refinement – the entire scaffolding of faces, characters and scenes unfolds, defining what is surrealism in its substance: obvious figurative antinomies in the juxtaposition of visible things, recognized in the natural order of the world, but realizing, at the level of the plastic image, new, unpredictable, disconcerting, ambiguous and mysterious relations.

Both the conception method of Sergiu Grapă are marked by the unusual, absurd and hybrid associations, suggesting additional determinations to the viewer, hypothetically modifying his appearances and disturbing the conventional meanings to give him the original image of “possible worlds”. This proteic and cumulative spectacle, full of plastic acrobatics and dream-hallucinatory visions in the forms of the most meticulous and academic “trompe l’oeil”, is based, in fact, on figurative metamorphoses and syntagmatic proximities that damage the logic of common sense and the habits of discursive knowledge. But the inner logic of surrealist creation, the expressive fiction of these absurd universes that exude exotic fascination and pleasant uncertainties, generously offers intuition and aesthetic knowledge, beyond the approximate verbalization of visual appearances, in a consistent and global “epistemological metaphor”.

A dominant note, however, is sensed, this time, at the level of symbolic motifs in the composition of the works, the artist highlighting characters who obsessively illustrate modern machinism and the “technological dehumanization” of contemporary society. People look like robots, and their relationships, in terms of reduced associations to the couple or duet, cut out empathy and human communication. Even the artist’s self-portraits, ironically malformed and terrifying, seem to come from the enigmatic area of fantastic narratives. Whether we have scenes with mythological characters, or we encounter humanoid beings in impossible contortions, with disarticulated anatomies and metamorphoses of science fiction, each time we are captured by these “dream frames”, causing amazement, questioning and anxiety. These utopian scenographies of the surreal are as many improbable projections in the volcanic and inexhaustible imaginary of the artist.

Thus, S. Grapă offers us his amazing and hermetic show, urging the viewer to adjust and to feel emotionally the load of possible meanings in the visual syntax of his paintings.

Professor PhD I. C. Corjan