Vasile Stefanoiu
Vasile Stefanoiu is a Romanian sculptor who through his sculptures conveys new messages with established techniques, moving from form to content, becoming an ideational art in which the concept takes precedence.
His credo is: art must have a message.
His sculptures are dynamic, the theme of movement has appeared repeatedly in his recent works.
In some of his sculptures, he brings back the legends of Greek mythology (abandoned since Auguste Rodin) and places them in different contexts, suggesting movement in metamorphosis, to create a way of seeing again in modern times.
In the last works, he focuses his message on the new language of the human body in relation to the dynamism propagated by digital technology that shaped his behavior.
Human creativity seems abandoned in favor of accessing the creativity offered by digital technology.
In the contemporary era, the way we see and perceive art and things around us has changed almost exclusively through the phone or other internet-connected devices.
The materials in which he sculpts are diverse: stone, marble, wood and stainless steel.
He has participated in numerous art exhibitions, solo or group, online, in the USA, Canada, Italy, but also physically, with sculptures at the Florence Art Biennale (2021 and 2023) or the San Remo Biennale in 2023, personal exhibition with 21 of sculptures. in MoBu Art Bucharest Romania.
Prizes:
- The PHOENIX International Prize for visual arts, in Venice on June 12, 2024 and was published in the art magazine CONTEMPORARY CELEBRITY MASTERS, vol. 3 – 2024;
- "The Best Contemporary Masters 2024" award, for the "Sculpture" category;
- "International BOTTICELLI Award" in January 2024 in Florence.
- GLOBAL ART VIRTUOSO: ELITE ARTISTIC CAREER ACHIEVEMENT AWARD page on Contemporary Art Collectors website.
- The Harmony for Humanity: The Global Consciousness Art Prize! "offered by Contemporary Art Collectors.
- "Career Art Award 2023" in Sanremo, Italy;
- The "International Prize Michelangelo The Genius of Italy" award in Rome 2023;
- "The STARS OF ART AND MARKET" award, in Rome 2023;
- "TOP ARTISTS - The Protagonists of Contemporary Art" Award 2023, in Venice, Italy;.
- "International Prize Leonardo Da Vinci" 2023 - Milan Italy;
- "Artist of the Year 2022" award at the Artavita Gallery competition in Santa Barbara;
- Numerous "Honorable Mentions" and "Talent prize awards", granted by art galleries.
You’ve spoken about the importance of message in art. Could you elaborate on how you ensure your sculptures not only manifest your technical skill but also convey profound ideational content? How do you balance form and concept in your works?
Through my sculptures, I convey new messages with established techniques, moving from form to content, becoming an ideational art in which the concept takes precedence.
The conceptual and technical process behind creating the illusion of movement in the static environment of my sculptures, is based on the fact that I do not slavishly reproduce forms found in reality, but interpret them, investing them with the ability to express an emotional and educational message.
My sculptures are dynamic, the theme of movement and metamorphosis appears repeatedly in my works.
My sculptures do not hide anything, the message is all the easier to receive as the viewer intuits the greatness of Greek mythology and the digital pulse of the new era, having the revelation of the lasting dialogue between classic and modern, static and dynamic, and corporeal and abstract from my sculptures.
The goal is to find a new contemporary language that does not deny tradition, but emerges from it to make a leap forward into the new century.
Let's not forget that, first of all, art is something that is felt, and if we don't feel, then we will never be able to understand what art is.
The form in which the beautiful object is given to us is that of perception.
You've expressed concerns about the direction of contemporary sculpture, particularly its move towards the abstract avant-garde. Can you discuss what you believe led to this shift and why you think it has resulted in sculpture losing its message and viewer engagement?
The sculpture must have a message, that's where the inspiration comes from, otherwise it's easy to make a sculpture when you have nothing to say. This is my credo.
Unfortunately, in contemporary sculpture, the use of light, easy-to-find materials that do not require manual skills or ready-made things predominates. And those who use classic natural materials, namely marble or stone, sculpt them with the angle grinder (flex), resulting in shapes that are as simplistic as they are strange, without conveying a message.
Thus, contemporary sculpture changed its approach and deviated towards the decorative, losing its message.
In reality, many works of art die because of poverty of content and marginality of perspective.
Thus, the sculpture risks becoming an Aphrodite whose temple collapses if there is no one to bring her offerings. Without contemplators, there remains only a sensible fact, fleeting and easily forgotten.
That's why I like to create a personal style that can be unique to my art and personality, trying to bring back the lost craft in carving, using traditional tools (chisel, drill, abrasives, etc.).
The end of the avant-garde does not come from an exhaustion of the new, of originality, from a diminution of the creative impulse, but from a change of attitude and the search is part of the process of establishing a new period, in which all styles can be found.
Thus, the transcultural superstyle of the 21st century can be seen in the art world.
Moreover, it is clear that one of the great contemporary changes is the democratization of art.
All this gives me courage and inspiration.
In reviving Greek mythology themes within modern contexts, what challenges do you face in making these ancient stories resonate with today's audiences? How do you select which myths to recontextualize and what modern elements do you incorporate?
All the legends from the mythology of ancient Greece have in the end, in conclusion, valuable wisdom for mankind, which remain perfectly valid even today.
That is why in some of my sculptures I take the narrative context of legends from the ancient Greek civilization and place them in different contexts, suggesting movement in metamorphosis, to create completely new meanings and evoke completely different emotions, a way of seeing, again , in modern times.
In all my sculptures with the theme of ancient Greek mythology, I choose to represent those significant figurative elements, simplified but suggestive to convey the message.
Those elements that are not found in the sculptures on the same theme in the history of art, for example: the handprint of the goddess Aphrodite who gave life to the statue in the sculpture "Pygmalion and Galatea" or the trace left in the negative by Galatea's body in the movement of descent from the plinth, abandoning the eternal beauty of the statue in favor of perishable life, in the same sculpture.
I could also add the representation of Eurydice's body in the negative, it being only an illusion of Orpheus' emotional pain in "Orpheus and Eurydice", as well as in the sculpture "Dante and Beatrice", or the voids in Icarus' body (" Icarus - the dream of freedom"), which give the shape of the "infinity" sign, arranged vertically, signifying the desire to reach infinity, the one that brought the failure of the flight and the examples can go on.
My aim is to rekindle interest in the imaginative richness of ancient Greek art, which since Auguste Rodin has been abandoned in sculpture, or treated superficially.
The ancient Greeks produced eternal values in the field of art, with deep roots, as a benchmark for all subsequent ages. From a technical point of view, they only reproduced coins and ceramic molds (terracotta), all other works of art were unique and impossible to reproduce.
Their completely exceptional position in the history of art is also due to this circumstance.
The culture of the ancient Greeks, along with some influences from the ancient Near East, formed the basis of art, philosophy, society, and education in the Mediterranean and Near East until Rome.
In Western civilization, the study of the Greek and Roman classics has traditionally been considered to be the foundation of the humanities and has traditionally been the cornerstone of a typical elite European education.
Therefore, European art draws its essence from the civilization of Ancient Greece.
Considering your recent focus on the interaction between human bodies and digital technology, how do you think the digital age has fundamentally altered the way sculptures are created and perceived? What is lost and what is gained in this digital shift?
In the last works I focus my message on the new language of the human body in relation to the dynamism propagated and induced by digital technology that shaped its behavior.
My sculptures are a fresco of the contemporary landscape, a new form of loneliness, where individuals try to take part more in digital environments and socialize in the digital world to avoid their emotional loneliness.
In my sculptures I carve a striking commentary on the imprint of the digital age on human behavior, contrasted with the grace of antiquity (New Aphrodite)
The reality is that in the last hundred years, mankind has made a huge technical leap, experienced unprecedented innovations and changes.
"A new civilization is about to appear in our lifetimes, and everywhere blind people are trying to stop it." Alvin Toffler stated in his book "The Third Wave".
In the contemporary era, the way we see and perceive art and things around us has changed almost exclusively through the phone or other internet-connected devices.
The Internet, through its egalitarian status, allows many millions of people to see art without the mediation of a single cultural hierarchy.
The distance of thousands of kilometers melts away and the window to another world opens wide.
On the other hand, this new virtual way of looking has opened people's keen appetite for the sensational, we live from sensation to sensation.
Our power of penetrability flattens, our sentimental value extinguishes in the pursuit of the sensational.
Thus contemplation, which is the golden vein of culture, seems to be lost.
The likelihood that their socialization in real life will be more affected increases and digital loneliness can be defined as a growing social problem.
Among teenagers, the passion for the computer and the Internet can range from a balanced and healthy involvement to addiction, involving multiple negative consequences on the physical, psychological and social functioning.
The ritual aspect, the uniformity of the characters, the isolation and lack of communication between individuals in my sculpture "Digital Loneliness", reflect this danger.
These sculptures engage with a critical question of our time: as we embrace digital acceleration, are we evolving or regressing?
From stone and marble to wood and stainless steel, your choice of materials is quite diverse. How do you decide which material to use for a particular sculpture, and what role does the material play in the overall message or effect of the piece?
I do not use new materials such as plastic or other light materials, in order not to degenerate my art into kitsch.
The situation where the material does not correspond to the purpose and, through a treacherous construction, is given as something, is perhaps one of the most common cases of kitsch object composition.
Schopenhauer prescribes the rule for understanding and obtaining aesthetic pleasure in the contemplation of a work by indicating that: "it is absolutely necessary to know intuitively, directly, the matter...our joy would suddenly diminish greatly after the discovery that the material construction is pumice stone. .. ".
Similarly, the Romanian esthetician Tudor Vianu drew attention to the relevance of the material in the construction of the work of art: "a plaster that imitates a wood sculpture... loses all aesthetics, it introduces a principle of dissolution and death into the work."
Marble, stone and wood are the most beautiful materials, nature itself and it speaks to me.
Sometimes carving directly on cross-sections of walnut wood, I explore the texture, contrast and shape of the wood, revealing the dynamic beauty of growth.
I mostly make sustainable circular art using recycled and repurposed resources to create art.
In my sculptures, marble is revived, reinvented through art, after destruction. I collect waste marble from the builders of funerary monuments and carve them with traditional tools: chisels, drills, abrasives, etc., used by hand.
It's the same with wood, I choose the best wood from the firewood and carve it.
In most cases, I choose the material and its form depending on the project of the future sculpture, defined in advance after long searches.
Other times, even the raw form of marble or wood inspires my future sculpture.
Throughout your career, how have your artistic influences evolved? Are there any particular artists or movements that have been instrumental in shaping the way you approach sculpture today?
I grew up in the sound of hammers and chisels that could be heard throughout my native village (Ciuta in Romania), where all the people carved the stone in the area to earn a living.
I learned to carve stone, taking advantage of the routine of my childhood, where, next to my father, I carved large stone crosses, on which I carved angels.
That's how I learned the craft of direct carving.
I made the leap from the craft of direct stone carving to artistic representation from a meeting, as a child, with the Romanian sculptor George Apostu, whom I saw carving some strange shapes that did not resemble those products of the village stonemasons.
Since then I have been searching for the answer for the rest of my life.
I trained in art courses, read a lot, visited museums and art galleries in Europe and New York.
My favorite sculptors are Michelangelo, Bernini and Constantin Brâncusi, my countryman, who gave such a blow, changing the perspective of modern sculpture, that for a century no one could stand up, not even on their knees.
I confess that movement and metamorphosis are recurring themes in my work, fascinated by the absolute master of the Baroque, Bernini, whose sculptures I admired in the Galleria Borghese in Rome, a museum I visited several times.
My favorite work by Bernini is the statuary group "Apollo and Daphne", a hallucinatory sensation of movement after a scene from the book "Metamorphoses" by the ancient Roman poet Ovid, a book that sits on my bedside table, due to my attachment to the great poet who he lived the last years of his life in Tomis in Romania, being exiled by the leadership from Rome, in the year 8 AD.
You’ve mentioned a desire to change the current trends in sculpture. Looking forward, what kind of changes do you hope to inspire in the sculptural world, both in terms of technique and thematic exploration?
Direct carving and crafting with traditional tools to reveal certain details that are significant to convey the message.
This is my approach to change the current trends where the sculpture is almost exclusively decorative, made with the angle grinder in marble or stone or the wood sculpture with the chainsaw, without a message, or with the message in the title that is not found in the form.
The approach to the sensation of real versus unreal in my sculptures is based on the premise that visual arts are not made to conform to reason. And accepting this paradox helps a lot in appreciating the art of our era.
The object is added to the world, not confused with it, like a cantilevered beam.
Immanuel Kant (1724 - 1804) said that "art does not aim at the representation of a beautiful thing, but the beautiful representation of a thing".
Sculpture is an art of volumes in space that tries to touch the sensitive chord of human persons through the spatial exposure of various real, three-dimensional objects.
The perception of three-dimensional objects can take place both visually and tactilely. Apparently, sculpture addresses the sight, but in reality this art form addresses, above all, the touch.
Having participated in prestigious exhibitions and received numerous awards, how do you feel these recognitions have influenced your career? Do you see them as validation of your artistic direction, or do they also shape the way you conceptualize future works?
Yes, validation is very important to me and I think it is the central objective of any artist.
One thing is clear: the concept of art is indeterminable, therefore every artist needs validation.
What is art? All attempts to answer this question have failed.
The great German philosopher Heidegger (1889-1976) had anticipated it: “It is believed that the essence of art can be acquired through a comparative search of existing works of art. But how can we be sure that what we take as a starting point for research is really the work of art, since we do not know in advance what art is."
Creative art needs individuals with independent thinking and the freedom and ability to think imaginatively: how to think, not what to think. Here is the break!
In my sculptures, I make the connections between authentic and artificial through the balance between figurative and abstract, i.e. between feeling, intuition and thinking, essentialization, through a simplified and synthetic sculptural language at the same time, resulting in a creation open to interpretation, which lives and it renews in the communication it creates with the viewer, with the surrounding space and light.
Sculpture is a tandem between empty and full in which light plays, just as painting is perceived from shadows and lights.
How do you gauge and respond to the reactions of your audience, especially when presenting works that challenge contemporary norms or reinterpret historical themes? Has audience feedback ever influenced the direction of your work?
I had the satisfaction that the visiting public is captivated by the message of my sculptures posted on social networks or on the occasion of the physical exhibition of some of my sculptures at the great exhibition MoBu 2024 at the Romexpo central pavilion in Bucharest, at the Florence Biennales (2021 and 2023) or at The Sanremo Biennale in September 2023, where the Italian public is familiar with the mythology of ancient Greece, which is taught in schools.
Yes, public feedback is very important. Social media has become the window to the world and I use it as a barometer that measures people's interest in what they do.
I explain each work of art starting from the contemporary truth that in the age of the Internet people have lost their golden vein of culture: contemplation.
This is how I try to break that enigmatic bubble that most artists use, showing inexplicable works of art to let visitors interpret them for themselves.
Art matters because it is meant to move people intellectually and emotionally.
The aesthetics of everyday life can be understood as a suspension of the everyday, it being a special distraction from the pressure of life's needs.
The world has never had a greater need for the restorative power of art.
I feel that now, living in a troubled world, it is more necessary than ever to create beauty that will be transformative.
As someone deeply invested in the message and impact of your art, what legacy do you hope to leave behind? Are you involved in mentoring emerging sculptors, and if so, what key principles do you emphasize in your mentorship?
The legacy I leave behind, as Marcel Duchamp testified in a 1971 interview, that fame is not important: "it is the posthumous viewer that counts."
I'm not thinking about mentoring, it would be too much, it's too late for me.
I don't have many summers left to borrow and I have a clear sky through which I can fly with my butterfly cage.