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ABOUT
FELIX AFTENE
ABOUT MY WORK
The spiritual valence and communication of human vital forms are the essence of the world which I represent through my work. The definition of human structure is fascinating me. These are the revelations which I propose to you.
The main source of inspiration for these works are the Romanian traditional customs. In the middle of winter villagers are manufacturing costumes and masks and they are dancing, singing traditional Romanian songs about right and wrong, about life and death. It's a agony and ecstasy sensation because the masked carol singers are noisy and frightful and they look like they are coming from the darkness of the times - horns, wings, feathers, bells, pipes, drums, sword - are the unfailing accessories of a traditional group of singers.
From the technical point of view I chose acryl on canvas technique for the limitless overlapping possibilities, the good color modulation and especially for the well-known chemical and physical resistence of the painting.Felix Aftene
A postmodernist painter with roots going back to German impressionists in what concerns the sobriety of colours and the rigour of the drawing, to which is added the metaphysical shiver in a proportion equal to the fantasy registers unfolded in horizontally programmed sequences, as in a narrative of the occurrences of the mind.
Radu Negru
Among his colleagues of generation, Felix Aftene acquired in short time a position of leader. He associated with some, broke up with others. He administers tactfully and intelligently his social-artistic direction, but also his image. All these prove intelligence and practical spirit, capacity of adaptation and personality.
As any young man, he feels he is in a relative state of belligerence with the forerunners but doesn’t defy the models of authority. He just wants something else and in a different manner. He has decided for the painting. But simultaneously, he makes graphics, scenography and mural art. The elements of continuity rely on the taste for the ironical recovery of signs and symbols that are
physically ans morally worn-out. This attitude creates new contexts and new forms of expressions. He uses detachedly Egyptian hieroglyphs, like an allusion to the Pharaoh funerary art, and ensure them new senses. He mocks at the cloning aberrations and makes out of the Dolly sheep a veritable kitsch star. He demythologizes the nude through excessively sexy solicitations and alludes to collage and gestures.
Felix Aftene is inventive and laborious. He has ideas, and moreover, a good manual ability. His spirit is connected to the stock exchange of the day’s matters and finds out personal solutions in order to make good scenery out of his works and a spectacle out of varnishing."A Century of Fine Arts in Iasi" 2004, Valentin Ciuca
Felix Aftene assumes a series of experiences at the border of abstraction, and is sometimes tempted by those imaginary calligraphies, by those lettrist incidents. It is a known fact that immediately after the war, Isidore Isou started that movement, using the Latin alphabet at the beginning, and then letters of his own invention, believing in the surrealistic tradition that those letters, that type of writing, could convey deeper, more secret messages than the common conventions. On this lettrist background, the artist experiments an alphabet, an abstract method of writing which portrays momentary states. I think that the freedom he acquires by expressing himself casually, freely and spontaneously represents an important feature of his approach, and the fact that he maintains this traditional, bidimensional convention of the painting, with occasional geometric insertions, with the echoes from purism, for example, that I found in some paintings, I believe that this keeps his efforts in an experimental zone which is extremely positive and promising for our art.
Constantin Prut
Felix Aftene’s works, a grandiose recital of all type of materials, noble and ignoble, have the great quality of being convincing, first of all, from a plastic point of view. An appetite for the juxtaposition of densities and textures, a rationally exacerbated tactility, colour refinement: these are qualities that the young painter successfully proves and with the help of which he can safely sail onwards.
Val Gheorghiu
His works have that convincing strength specific to authentic creation. One can immediately feel that these ways of expression are the answer to intense inner experiences which can only be expressed in this manner.
D. N. Zaharia
Substantial as always, restless, cleverly experiencing all possibilities, Felix Aftene proves most persuasively that he has decided for good for the idea of polemical continuity. His compositions, clearly modern in attitude, radiate through the contact with the sign and the meaning. He creates zoological hybrids, alludes to cloning, and dreams, like Baudelaire, of dark gods.
The artist’s monumentalist structure allows him to develop compositions both on large surfaces, and within small frames. His framings remind of the disposition of fresco scenes specific to churches in Northern Romania and not only, that is, following the epic thread of a story. Felix Aftene maintains the sequences, but eliminates their story. His spirit is open to synthesis; he no longer follows the story, but aspires to an expression freed from the epic refuse. Thus, the serialization sums up the elements of a discourse characterized by the possibility of variable order. Morphology defines and the syntax analyses. The architecture of the images brings forth the large line of the medieval arches, doors and portals, niches and windows, open towards the beyond. The symbolic dimension reveals a need to dive imaginarily into the past and a recovery of that past by means of eloquent signs specific to a visual culture. Without forcing the language in any way, Felix Aftene expresses himself in a modern, fluent and brilliant manner. The chromatics experiences with the brightness of matter by a clever usage of light, and comforts by dimming the matter mat. Therefore, the overall impression associates spontaneity with elaboration, the dream with the impact of the concrete. Eliminating the allusive or the ambiguous from the esthetics of this discourse does not diminish the aura of mystery of the ensemble, but only certifies the clearness of thought.Valentin Ciuca
