by PIERRE ROUVE

The few paintings which Doru Imbroane Marculescu has chosen to show in Cambridge may at first sight disconcert the beholder mesmerized by his Crucifixion a fiery pulpit sermon in full blast. It is essential to grasp that the reason for this bewilderment is to be found in the sight of the beholder, not in the pictorial sights which confront him. For all their unobtrusive restraint, they are much harder to decipher than meets the eye.

They too, like the Crucifixion, demand of the senses to exude the sense enshrined in assorted visual offerings. But their chromatic sensuality sheds a succession of obstacles along the eye's natural journey to the mind accustomed to revere domineering and yet sterile learned art historical notions such as Expressionism, admirably defined by Kurt Pinkhus in 1919 as "Menscheit 's Dämmerung "- Mankinds Twilight: a macabre confession of ultimate despair.

In turn, perceptive psychoanalysts have striven to prove that the innocuous label "Expressionism " conceals a compound of colours which run wild and pulsating brush strokes which whip the canvas at the height of a pathological frenzy clinically ascertainable in the turbulence of Van Gogh, Munch or Kokoschka.

But there is no trace of such violent hopelessness in Marculescu' s paintings for all their misleading appearance as some kind of belated "Expressionist lookalike" way of painting. Furthermore, he explicitly insists on stressing the uninterrupted religious undercurrent in his work and deliberately chooses meaningful titles to guide the vacillating spectator in the right spiritual direction. And the less this beholder' s sight is diverted and perverted by ill - absorbed and wrongly used pedantic cognitions, the easier he will find it to progress toward a deeper communion with Marculescu' s well nigh devotional works. Blessed be the poor in bookish epistemological pride, for theirs will be the radiant axiological peace of mind.

Once aware that, for all their inobtrusive modesty, these paintings are built on supreme Christian values, the beholder cannot fail to sense why the artist rejects the unleashed violence of hopeless howls and abhors the gruesome gale of brushstrokes, symptoms of a spiritual delirium tremens.

His visual idiom favours the resolved tensions between juxtaposed single-colour spots. Should we still want to hint at the distant Expressionist lineage of Marculescu' s art, we may only gain from coining the notion of " Meditative Expressionism ": for all its apparent contradiction in terms, it is best suited to evoke the poised allusive echos of deeper states of the soul compiling this humble believer to paint praying or pray painting for God' s greater glory.

1st April 1997

London

(Pierre Rouve, Professor of Philosophy of Art and former Vice-President of the International Association of Art Critics)