There is an obvious, audacious surrealist vein in Laurențiu Zbîrcea’s art, as his painting appear both to embody almost idiosyncratic confessions and to explore a kind of Jungian, collective unconscious. Compositionally layered and playing with plural perspectival viewpoints, his technically unconventional paintings encourage the eye to move back and forth across the surface, discovering elements and details, trying to decipher and to relate the actions of the character to the elements of the settings. The latter are as elaborate as they are fantastic, implausible, yet uncannily familiar looking places, products of the artist’s imagination, yet weirdly relatable.
Some visual references in Zbîrcea’s paintings are decidedly cultural: an Egyptian landscape is connoted by such predictable visual tropes as the camel or the pyramids, one dark, concomitantly solemn and menacing figure has the “typical” eye and gaze that popular culture associates with extraterrestrial human-like creatures. Other figures of his composition appeal more directly and more imprecisely to metaphorical topoi and spaces that are present in the imagination of many -most?- humans: a gentleman / traveler with a rather sumptuous hat and respectable allure can’t seem to be able to shake off his sinister shadow, a red, leafless tree grows impetuously out of the heart of a fallen man.
All in all, the elements that provide his works with their arresting charm are the tensed dichotomies that Zbîrcea seems to play with almost casually, yet forcefully. His images are born out a combination of graphic approaches to the surface and fully painterly procedures; line never gives up guiding the eye throughout the composition, yet color is expressive and its sensuousness sometimes wild. Cultural clichés are combined with personal memories and reveries, in an art that owes equally to surrealism, neo-expressionism and primitivist impulses, yet ends up being strikingly personal, conjuring a dark, yet appealing visual universe, which is coherent by its own, internal laws and dynamics.