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05/08/2008: "BENONE OLARU"
In the world of artists, there are some who excel to an extent that it isn’t fair to allow them to work without mention. Benone Olaru is one of them.
Born in the heart of Transylvania, in a small city called Hunedoara, he has made the unusually high quality of his work known throughout Italy, making statues honoring among others, the bicyclist Marco Pantani after his tragic downfall and death. There is more to the work than just an incredibly high level of technique, as all of his sculptures speak from the spirit of Eastern Europe in an almost Byzantine way.
Rumania, where this artist comes from, is one of the most economically impoverished countries in Eastern Europe. Yet their government employs huge groups of Rumanian artists to realize public projects throughout their country. Our own country is at this moment in our history, one of the most culturally impoverished in the world relative to its per capita income.
The National Endowment for the Arts has no database of living American artists working in the United States, nor do they have any plans to establish one, according to Sarah Cook, executive assistant to the Chairman. Many countries with far fewer resources do, and in fact, it’s such an easy thing to put together. The NEA’s website might add a page where artists could enter their own information, or where museums or other organizations involved with living artists could. In a matter of months, with no involvement from staff other than set-up, a list could be close to completeness; with just the smallest amount of advance publicity to create awareness that this was being done. It would certainly better this organization’s abysmal standing with American artists, whether or not it actually had any effect on their careers. 
Benone Olaru felt the need for other influences, so he went far and wide to other parts of the world to refine his already prodigious skills. He went to Korea to work in granite, and after a few years there, settled in Italy where he works today. His studio is full of every manner of hand made tool you can imagine, because apart from being a sculptor, he is skilled at working with a forge and at tempering steel. He works in wood as well as stone, and large figures dominate his studio. The style is almost archaic, with many religious references, and reveals a continuation of a tradition while still being influenced by the events and feelings of contemporary society.
Ever in motion, and as detached as he is from his origins, he has become a gatherer, collecting inspiration from the new things he sees while keeping and using everything he’s picked up in other places along the way. Many of his pieces portray motion, which in his own life is a constant because of his extensive travels, and in this way his message is completely sincere. He speaks of what he knows.
In our own efforts as artists, there is something we all can learn from this. We might find ourselves questioning what to devote our energies to, how to find a subject and a way of expression that others around us, our viewers, our patrons, and prospective new clients, will find persuasive and profound. Many artists try to create the image of themselves as a seer, a mystic, someone above the level of those viewing their work.
Expressiveness in art is mostly beyond the control of artists themselves. When an artist’s intent is to have a certain effect on their viewers, to amaze them and awe them, the formula works only until those viewers are able to understand what they are looking at, and what the intent was that produced it. At that point, it is diminished, like when you first see a magic trick, and then come to understand how it was done.
It is much better, therefore, to keep your secrets, and the best way to do this, is not to have any. A natural and sincere expression is already so complex that even the artists themselves don’t really understand how they came to have produced what they have made, or the millions of nuances that find their way into the work without them having made a conscious effort to place them there. These are the works you can look at time and time again, yet each different day, and mood, will produce new sensations.
In every work, and certainly included are those works that use tricks to grab the attention of viewers, there exist these millions of unintentional nuances. When a trick is used, however, for example the slashed canvasses of Fontana, those nuances are eclipsed by that one-dimensional, overpowering element that the artist has intentionally put there, and become impossible to see, as it is impossible to see the details of the cloud surfaces a few degrees to the left or right when you’re staring at the sun. This is the risk the artist takes when creating signature works that can be recognized simply because they’ve put a patent on one silly trick in order to get attention. One dimensional, simple, and incredibly easy to look at only once. The school of facile art.
Technique can’t produce a never ending flow of emotions either, for in effect it is just another trick. But if a balance is achieved between sincerity, spirituality, and beautiful workmanship, then the feeling it can produce is that of a concert, a harmonious gathering of a number of elements working together in synchronicity.
John the Baptist is the most developed of Benone’s work that I have ever seen. There is extraordinary detail in the curls descending from the head, and it is beyond my comprehension as a stone sculptor how these elements were made in granite! This is not a forgiving stone, it is one that destroys tools, blunts chisels, and tears the diamonds off stone saw blades. I have rarely seen this kind of three dimensionality given to marble works, let alone to granite. But as a professional, I see these tour de forces; I am sure someone who doesn’t carve stone would not. And that is something that makes this work strong. It looks as if it had been done effortlessly as much as I know it was not.
But it is the spirituality of the piece that paralyzes me in front of it. It is not an anatomical reproduction, rather it has the kind of exaggeration common to Michelangelo pieces like the Moses that tell a story and become theatre. The elements of design allow the viewer to associate freely with the biblical story, and make sense of the total picture. At this point Benone’s job is to tell the story and choose colors and shades to make it his own.
The result shows he is a master of his chosen media.
