One of the most striking Romanian sculptors today, Marian Zidaru (1956), has been engaged in recent years in an extensive editorial project dedicated to a new, illustrated translation of Dante's Divine Comedy. Published in 2021 (Vremea Editions, translated by Cristian Bădiliță), Inferno especially allowed Zidaru to display his own Dantesque imaginary, not only through the electrifying illustrations he created and dedicated to Aligheri, but also through the strong echo felt in the rest of his work.
Whether we talk about drawing, painting, sculpture, video or installation, the infernal imagery has always seduced him (that's the right word, even if it sounds chilling). Since the mid-80s (the Crăciun însîngerat / Bloody Christmas exhibition, at the Muzeul Satului/Village Museum, Bucharest, December 1984) Marian Zidaru was at ease in the dark perimeter of sacrifice, of the beheadings, violence, torture and punishments of all kinds, which was forcefully aimed at the viewer, beyond or at the same time with the perfect stylization of the sculptural forms that carried that cruelty. His inclination towards the representation of brutal aggression was not only insular in the Romanian art landscape of the time (directly and indirectly censored by the communist authorities, for whom any representation of repression and violence was prohibited), but also morally, politically, historically, even prophetically readable - in 1989, Romania had a bloody Christmas for real, which separated it from communism in the most violent way possible.
The infernal imagery had and still has a strong ethical and prophetic component in Marian Zidaru’s work. Apparently an overtly gentle, and non-conflictual personalities of Romanian art, his visual oration combines (in the predominantly wooden sculptures) the attraction for gracefully rounded and elongated forms with sharp, spiky, toothy, ferocious outgrowths.
Marked by mystical signs and symbols and at the same time by pithy vibrations of rough, violent surfaces, as if totemic poles, his sculptures and many of his drawings surprise with the seductive flow of morphology, sealed by the raging eruption of vital fluids wasted by fatal wounds. The combination sounds paradoxical and bipolar as an idea and psychological experience, but is perfectly coherent as artistic and visual execution.
Marian Zidaru achieves a thrilling fusion between the elegant candor of the forms and the devastating ethics of the moralizing message.
He is the visual agent of a perpetual Last Judgement, which identifies and punishes on the spot (and with extreme severity) every vice and sin, the great and insignificant crimes, from simple spiritual indifference to the massacre of the innocents. If Brâncuși constantly shunned violence (the monumental ensemble from Târgu Jiu, dedicated to the military heroes who fell in the First World War, does not contain any shadow of military imagery, no touch of violence, not even merely symbolic) and created perfectly polished forms (literally and figuratively), which harmonically captivate the sight and the soul, Marian Zidaru, for whom Brâncusi's work is a central landmark of his vision, intensely vibrates the surfaces with visible axe blows, which chops the wooden skin of the sculptures, assaults their body and highlights the pain and the violence as true visual and moral principles.
Inferno 2.0 at Galeria Nicodim is a genuine Summa Infernalia of Marian Zidaru. It is his most extensive and haunting infernal ensemble to date, a retrospective of violence, nourished by the long-lasting Dantesque backbone of his work, which often foreshadows, and in the immediate present explicitly corresponds to these tempora infernalia that we live and from the nightmare of which we can't wake up. Along with a series of works and installations from 2015-2019, the centerpieces of the exhibition include the somber installations Inferno (600/100/40cm), 2022 and The Last Judgment (600/180/30cm), 2023 and also the Hitchcockian Field of Birds ( 300 pieces, 700/700/30cm), 2023.
Painfully actual, Marian Zidaru's work is as always anti-escapist, wildly connected to the suffering of the world. Marian Zidaru's art evades out of visual culture and flows directly into morality, into lived history, into suffering, war and death.
Erwin Kessler