The tormented tension of Doru Marculescu' s Crucifixion is bound to stun Western eyes prone to assume that only dispassionate elongated verticals befit the sacrificial spirituality of the Cross. A time-honoured metonymy transfers on to the tool of torture the divine essence of the tortured and calls for strictly regulated reverence.

Even beyond the religious divide sanctioned by the Council of Niceea in 321 such turmoil of contorted curvilinear flesh may be seen by some as a slur on the creed of sculptor's cultural compatriot, the Moldavian Paissie Velichkovsky who, hand in hand with the Russian Dimitri Rostovsky heralded the transdanubian resurgence of the Orthodox mystical theology of Byzantium culminating in the profound meditations of our quasi contemporaries Solovyov, Berdyaiev and Shestov. Nothing could be further from the truth in this startling Cross.

The roots of Marculescu's turbulent techne rhetorike plunge deep into a fundamental canon of Eastern Orthodox Christianity perpetuating the scorn which Genadios Scholares pours on all "beast-like humans".

And yet precisely this congenital bestiality of all men spurs the Son of Man to die for their Redemption. This is why the Romanian sculptor shuns the apatheia of the conventionally paradisiacal Cross and glorifies Christ by baring the impurity inherent in a heap of decaying flesh.

In this intuitive revival of an ancestral conviction the flowing undulating lines and blown up volumes which Western Baroque fancies had reduced to mere decorative arrangements of dumb drapes regain a long lost metaphysical consistency and flare up with renewed eloquence equally valid on both sides of the confessional divide. And indeed had not Henry Vaughan written that "all flesh is clay " and had not Donne sensed its "sinuous threads "?

And yet this fearful mass of mercilessly moulded mortal flesh is far from being a genuflection for the greater glory of evil as Dualist Bogomil heretic and neurotic German Expressionists would have seen it. For Marculescu God is not dead because we all are "children of light " (Luke 16.6). This glimmer in the "secretissima nox " preceding our Redemption reveal the coalescence between the spiritual intent and visual utterances of Marculescu mirroring St. Augustine's outcry: "My heart is anguished ". That is why, for all its limitations, this three dimensional theology remains constantly convincing. This unfashionable and perhaps unfathomable "Crucifixion" surges in the artist's private Purgatory.