I am used to write exclusively about authors I realy like. This way I was never forced to criticize what I was presenting. But today I am about to break this habit. To some degree.
Fortunately I will not have to criticize the author but the genre. And surely not the selected paintings.
Sorin is a photo realist painter. I know at least one person that will be delighted about this article and one that will criticize me for it.
The first one is right cause you simply have to be amazed by the skill involved, by the excellent technique he employs. The second one is right for a different reason. The photo realist genre is pushing your limits as a painter a but it is also limiting in a certain way. The difficulty of the execution aside, the limitation comes from the fact that a photo realist painting can never be more beautiful than the photo it is copying.
I belive each painter should have the right to alter reality to his own liking. To accentuate that part of the landscape that dominates the other, the one that made him choose that particular subject. To change the color range or, why not, to replace a color with its opposite if he feels like it. It is his right too eliminate all those elements that would prevent the spectator from getting the message, those that would distract him. Or to reduce the level ef details down to essence.
It might be easier to express this with an example. Here are two Berberian paintings that are taking this idea to the extreme. Look at the thumbnails first and try to imagine them at the original size.
Then click them to see how little detail actually took to produce the effect. Your brain is filling in the rest.
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It is my opinion that photo realism is depriving the author of these rights. Maybe this is the reason I didn’t like many of Sorin’s paintings.
But this is the only negative comment I am going to indulge in. The paintings I have selected for the article today I do like. Very much so.
Especially the one called Autumn Leaves (to the right). It is a country side landscape showing an old house in need of repairs. There is a cellar window and you can see a small portion of the sidewalk, as old and eroded as the house. You can guess a defoliated tree to the upper right, probably the reason for the painting name. And then there is this woman, facing away from you, barely visible against the wall cause her clothes are almost of the same color as the background (this is not intended as a portrait). Her posture is expressing her old age and the difficult living she’s enduring. The painting is graphically somewhat well balanced and leaves a lot to the imagination, probably cause many things are only partially represented, leading me to mentally recompose the full picture: the people poverty, probably most of them very old, the only ones left in that old corner of a world with old the young ones gone to live in the city, in search of an better conditions. I love the earth tones dominating the picture, so well chosen for this tale. Everything is contributing to an emotional, meditative air (at least to the viewer which resonates to the sadness of the old age and poverty). |
I want to call your attention to another work before leaving you to enjoy the rest of the paintings selected from his site. This painting alone would be reason enough to feel so glad I have learned about Sorin Sorin.
It is the opposite of the previous one. A blast of color, exuberant shapes and reflections. Photo-realistic or not, this is a super work.
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Sorin was born in the soviet Moldova. He startedpainting in 1996 and he has authored 800 since then!
He hasa a website which you must visit.
