Liviu Stoicoviciu belongs to a group of unconventional artists who have operated beyond the mainstream currents of local artistic thought and sensibilities, building their practice outside immediate imperatives—in a trans-local and trans-temporal domain.
In the 1980s, Stoicoviciu was already a different kind of artist from what one typically encountered—an artist without narrative or local affiliation.
Romanian modernism had always been firmly grounded, meant to protect it from the “delirium” of the international avant-garde. This earthy relationship manifested itself through storytelling, through an obsessive focus on detail that could be rendered into text. Painting, in particular, is prone to this exchange of media: regardless of its distance from academicism or romanticism (those peaks of literary-narrative complicity), the painted surface instantly triggers an extra-pictorial, associative discourse. Even the most abstract images connect with areas of the collective mythos—folk embroidery and wood carving, ceramic ornamentation, synthetic-folkloric translations of landscape structures, the unextinguished flame of national history, and so on.
Confronting us with a universe devoid of codes, his systematically developed, meticulously composed body of work is like a map without coordinates or compass. While he is indeed an abstract artist, this classification proves precarious in Romania, where abstraction is always underpinned by the safety net of the concrete. His tie to the French school—Braque, in particular, whose warm, subtly graded colors Stoicoviciu initially seems to favor—doesn’t lead anywhere culturally. He is neither part of Braque’s melancholic lineage nor an epigone of that prestigious current. Instead, he goes beyond that model in a topographical, rather than a qualitative sense, like a train passing through cultural landscapes on an unclear route. For Stoicoviciu, as for any true creator, there is no fixed destination—the artistic act is both the process and the purpose in itself.
Călin Dan