Abstract

Horia Bernea (1938–2000) has been a major figure in Romanian art during his lifetime, and the importance conferred to him has not faded after his death. In taking as a starting point one among his early drawings, I am attempting to ponder on his artistic trajectory and on his sustained reflections on the status of the image at the intersection (or encounter) of trace and matter, a trajectory which I see—in resorting to a concept launched on the occasion of an important exhibition held at the turn of the twenty-first century—as an example of iconoclash. (The original version of this text was published quite a while ago as a contribution to a Festschrift: Memory, Humanity, and Meaning. Essays in Honor of Andrei Pleșu’s Sixtieth Anniversary. Edited by Mihail Neamțu & Bogdan Tătaru-Cazaban, Bucharest: ZetaBooks, 2009, 433–446. I am grateful to the publisher and to the editors for the permission to publish this text in a slightly revised form. I t expresses my concerns at the time of its writing, which remain largely valid. Bernea’s artistic trajectory reflects a tension that can be seen as a type of “iconoclash”, which was eventually resolved in favor of an almost militant recovery of the image, and of a particular mode of approaching it, that is, through painting, and its materiality. It appears that this idea has provided the editor with a valuable argument around the questions this volume proposes to approach.