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Embodying its iconoclastic drive, Clement Greenberg, the greatest and ultimately failed prophet of artistic modernism, claimed that art is as good as it is pure and that painting, at its best, must therefore be about the essence of painting itself: colour and flatness. Greenberg was only partially wrong: the very essence of painting is indeed that it is about itself, but concomitantly about existence, about life, in some aspect of it. It is colour and flatness as active forces, secreting atmosphere and meaning, not as passive attributes. Therefore, it is not that every good painting is good because it succeeds aesthetically as an abstract, coloured surface. Rather, the unavoidable abstractness of every painting is as good as it is rich: rich in atmosphere, in meaning, in seductiveness, in sensuousness (ultimately, both Malevich and Morandi understood painting better than Greenberg). At its very best, painting is therefore never free of danger and temptation: the line between icon (ontologically pregnant) and idol (self-glorifyingly beautiful or spectacular) is always there to be crossed.
Cantemir Hauși understands this. For him, painting seems to be both an ecstatic and an ascetic process. He is one of the rare painters capable of resisting the temptation to resolve grave tensions: between frenzy and meditation, between poetry and craft, between seduction and restraint. Instead of opting for one or the other, Hauși allows himself to be consumed by these tensions, and it is this enduring of tensions that makes his painting at once madly dense and deceptively phantasmal. Layer upon layer of paint, his paintings relentlessly strive for elegance, not of the dandyish kind (which boldly and seductively points towards itself), but rather imbued with aristocratic allure (which points subtly towards a higher beauty and order).
His works uncompromisingly demand attention, even to be fully enjoyed, let alone to allow their atmosphere to be absorbed or their meanings to be grasped. Thus, Hauși’s paintings are unapologetically challenging to the average contemporary art viewer, so accustomed to and overwhelmed by vulgar immediacy, fast metaphors, and all sorts of cheap grace. They reveal almost nothing of value unless they are patiently and daringly scrutinised.
Paradoxically and sensuously, his paintings can easily trick. At first, diverse in "style" and "theme", visually charming and sometimes ghostly populated, they can appear to be almost vacuous, painterly tours de force; they seem to lead towards Kundera’s unbearable lightness of being. Yet, under sustained scrutiny, they disclose a different order of experience, closer to Dostoyevsky's terrible beauty and redemptive weight of being, one suspended between gravity and grace: the vibrant solemnity of life unfolding through the unexpected and hierophanic kinship of forests, humans, beasts, and light itself.
Cantemir Hauși's art displayed at Galeria Relicvar is ultimately about this solemnity of being that the painter approaches with roaring enthusiasm and acquired sobriety, with steady hand and tremulous soul, with piety for the craft and undomitable courage. It is about a beautiful gravity and a redeeming grace that permeate all creation and to which his elegantly tensed paintings allude with awe and trembling.
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