David Farcaș is, without a doubt, one of the artists who has stood out the most in this (new) context of painting over the past five years. After completing a Master’s degree in sculpture—a medium in which he initially created installations from reclaimed old wood—and within the specific context mentioned above, he naturally transitioned to painting, which has today become the dominant medium in his practice. He engages in a type of painting with a well-articulated, deeply personal, and aestheticized discourse, featuring a fresco-like materiality inspired by anti-modernist heroes of the 20th century, such as Mario Sironi, Giorgio Morandi, or Carlo Carrà, primarily embracing a refined compositional mastery concealed beneath an apparent simplicity of the depicted subject.
David produces few paintings, despite maintaining a rigorous daily working rhythm. This is because everything unfolds directly on the canvas or wooden support, as the case may be. When the artist selects the final image from all possible configurations, one or two additional iterations may appear, subtly modifying details and atmosphere. This stoic layering of successive strata does not trouble him, as he pursues that fresco-like physical materiality, supported by a tonal chromatic range.
The second prominent aspect that draws us into his works is light, specific to the Hesychast East or to metaphysical painting (pittura metafisica). This effect is achieved through the technique by which he organizes his colors, contrary to the Byzantine sankir, in order to create the illusion of a captive light radiating from within the frame and the scene; the artist first applies lighter colors, modulating them tonally toward darker ones.
The light source within his compositions also contributes to this effect, being as solid and unforgiving as a spotlight and as yellow as a 1990s kitchen bulb. It originates either from a zenithal source that eliminates shadows or from an oblique one with pronounced shadows, projected directly into the center of the composition. The atmospheric effects he pursues can be found during the day, often in the bluish haze of dusk rather than in indirect, scorching light. Instead of using techniques such as dilution with turpentine to achieve this effect, the artist relies on the same modulation of colors through repeated layering.
His compositions defy conventions such as linear perspective and do not attempt to conceal their surreal undertones, focusing instead on their full, unsettling impact. There is also much of Paul Cézanne in David, though this is not immediately apparent; it resides rather in the way he conceals everything within the pictorial plane through the modeling of matter, and in how the image is constructed from patches of color rather than compositional lines. This method of construction may also naturally derive from his sculptural practice. As a result, the conventional contradiction between color and drawing is eliminated, and a secondary effect is the cancellation of any suggestion of volume.
The narrative is ambiguous, akin to magical realism. For example, I cannot say—perhaps not even the artist in precise terms—why the large-scale canvas featuring a scythe, which could have been a perfectly ordinary rural scene, becomes an evocative allusion to Liberty Square in Baia Mare; this should rather be explained apophatically, as a means specific to our collective psycho-social space. Often, his landscapes are a mixture of rural and urban, of real and imagined buildings, within a schematic, fortress-like architecture. They are angular, seemingly carved from a massive block of stone, and lit from above, without shadows. Opaque windows reflect light instead of inviting us inside, rejecting the gaze and revealing the absence of an inhabitable interior space. The deserted streets are, more often than not, intersections or dead ends. Claustrophobia is heightened by a dense, metallic sky that constantly presses down upon the city and its inhabitants.
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I believe that many of the approaches in David Farcaș’s work address the fundamental challenge of Western art and image-making: how can one represent something that does not exist in the real world?