A. COSTINESCU - ALBUM 2018

Luchian, Nicolae Tonitza, Alexandru
Ciucurencu, Vasile Grigore, the painter
has the attitude of the character who sets
up his easel in Montmartre and
Montparnasse, Venice, Florence and
Capri, Greece, Spain or in the old
neighbourhoods of Bucharest , loving
plein-air and intensely absorbing the
beauty of geography, the atmosphere,
looking for exotic corners of nature that
allow him to create strikingly new images,
rich in romanticism and picturesque.
Keeping also the cult of the atelier as
the old masters, knowing the structural
rigors of the image and using them to
involve the luminous tones and the vivid
and wild colour, Augustin Costinescu
creates, on a well articulated
reinforcement of the drawing, masses of
chromatic essence ordered after the
precepts of chromatology, according to
norms that benefit the light effects placed
on the entire surface of the work, or in
perspective or horizontal and vertical
plans. The visual sensations resulting
from this osmosis of the surprisingly
bright colourfulness are also related to the
inner sunlight of the artist, who knows
how to look with the eyes of his mind, the
variations in the atmosphere of the
landscape in the full day, his sincerity to
the motif insinuating in the
juxtapositions of tones, in the
metamorphosis of warm and cold colours
that embroider bays and settlements
bordering on water, quays, urban
frameworks, buildings filled with
mysteries, places of worship enveloped in
chromatic harmonic sounds, surprising
assemblies and details gathered together
according to the painting data,
commensurate with his experience and
talent.
There are obvious the plastic ways in
which Augustin Costinescu impresses the
vivid colours with a special glow, a purity
and saturation of the pigment, sometimes
on the brink of incandescence. A certain
freedom in the handling of the brush, as
well as the gestures retained in the
application of dazzling and blazing tones,
highlights the brilliance of the material
placed over the figurative components,
uniformly outlined, stylized by the
subjectivity of the direct emotion, but
according to the objectivity of his
experience for decades. The colour,
correlated with the forms, denotes the
stylistic principles of expressionism and
fauvism, under whose seal he is placed
through naturalness, from which it
abstracts the crudity of the substance
adjacent to the sensitive part, becoming
himself, the identity and the continuator
of the path of colourful Romanian style of
painting. Continuous searches of plastic
solutions are evoked by the ordering
surfaces of the composition, creating
perspectives or flattened areas of the
imaging field, born out of string linkages
and rhythmically staggered lines, wearing
plastic expressions induced by the
impressions of the motif.
The care for complementary pairs of
red/green and yellow / blue image
increases contrasts and plasticity, allowing
mixtures, associations and oppositions of
nuances to highlight the visual acuity of
the artist, whose attention insists on
thermo-dynamic colours, generating
psychological effects. Perspective surfaces
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