LISANDRU NEAMȚU

WIN Gallery: Looking back on your career, is there a common thread linking painting, mosaics, monumental art projects and your career as a teacher?

Lisandru Neamțu: I think this question is extremely relevant today, perhaps even more so than ever before. Yes, this thread does exist and has developed over the course of more than three decades. In fact, this year marks 30 years since I started working as a young teaching assistant at the National University of Arts in Bucharest, in the mural art department. It is a place I loved very much and which I still love; it is, in fact, the very department I graduated from as a young graduate after six years of study. It was here that I was trained, and it is here that I, in turn, continue to train the young people who come to this field of artistic expression. Being a teacher is a great passion, but also a challenge – often you have to repeat certain things, go over forms, words and elements, delight in your students’ curiosity, tell them ‘No’, and teach them what restraint means, what self-knowledge means. But I do everything as if I were doing it for the first time. I always experience the surprise of something new when engaging with the person I’m talking to, and I’m never a little surprised when I realise that I have at least as much to learn from my students as they have to learn from me.

WIN Gallery: You’re a keen observer of the changes the new generation is going through. What qualities do you think a young artist should cultivate to remain relevant today?

Lisandru Neamțu: I’ve noticed a profound shift in the collective mindset of young people pursuing art. Sometimes they don’t even know themselves whether they actually want to pursue art or not. At present, there is a huge difference between the generations of students I taught in the early days and those of today. You can see differences from one year to the next, from one cohort of graduates to the next. These differences relate more to their approach to the topics assigned to them, their term projects and their general outlook on life. In other words, the resources at their disposal are so vast that they end up not knowing how to use them, or how not to get lost in this ‘forest’ of information. And so the lecturer’s role is to provide a little guidance, not to dictate, but simply to encourage those aspects that benefit the students. And, of course, to provide a few landmarks, just as the stars in the sky help sailors find their way at night, out on the open sea. And with these landmarks, everyone must steer their own ‘boat’ towards a harbour.

WIN Gallery: Your works span not only different colour palettes but also different styles of painting, figurative art and graphic art. What motivates you to change style, and how does your ‘artistic self’ adapt to these new parameters?

Lisandru Neamțu: Sometimes I feel the need to create graphic works and figurative art drawn from my own memories, from the research trips I’ve undertaken, which I’ve captured on paper, on a white background with blue graphic marks. Memories transport you to another world; they open a gateway to places that, at present, you can only access through memory. That is what I try to do: to facilitate an imaginary journey to worlds that exist in a form known only to me. As for the dominant colour, I sometimes joke that I have a large barrel of blue in my studio that I need to use up. Everything you see in my works as landscapes, particularly those from Italy, are places I have visited and which have made an impression on me. I have captured on paper Sant’Apollinare, the Fish Market in Venice, views of Venice, Rome with Castel Sant’Angelo, and many others. Through this exercise, I recall people and places from twenty, perhaps even thirty years ago, when my steps led me towards horizons that changed my life and my artistic vision.

WIN Gallery: The years spent at the ‘Nicolae Tonitza’ Art High School and then at the ‘Nicolae Grigorescu’ Institute of Arts coincided with a period of remarkable rigour and competition. Which teachers and which lessons do you consider to have decisively shaped the career of the artist Lisandru Neamțu?

Lisandru Neamțu: In my first year, I had Professor Petre Achițenie, who took us straight to a building site from the very start and gave us our ‘initiation’, so to speak, with a fresco project. That’s how I actually got caught up in this whirlwind of the arts. From my second year onwards, I was taken under the wing of Professor Marilena Preda-Sânc, with whom I’ve had an extraordinarily good relationship over the years. She was also my supervisor for my second PhD in visual arts. And I can say that she was the person I could always rely on, from whom I gained insight, who understood me and who supported me, no matter how small or large the projects I was working on and developing were. And so I absorbed from these professors’ thinking what it truly means to be an artist. Being an artist isn’t just about taking part in exhibitions, going to great lengths, or showing off how great you are; it’s about having that calling and working every day, even if it’s just for five minutes. There has to be something within you that makes you want to paint or sculpt, to create every day. The word that springs to mind right now is ‘continuity’. You can’t do without it; it’s a continuous, daily exercise that you have to undertake if you’re working in this field. That’s what I’m actually trying to instil in my students: an awareness of a job well done, and done every day. A little progress every day – that matters enormously because it represents the continuity of thoughts, ideas and technique. Not to mention the fact that artists express themselves through sketches, specific techniques and distinct modes of expression, and sometimes all of this gets lost in the hectic world, so ‘bombarded’ with stimuli, in which we live today. If you don’t have that continuity—that ‘fluid’ which flows through you day after day, to which you return and which you refine—you cannot claim to exist as an ‘artist’. A great many people display, so to speak, their minor talents and their little artistic ‘doodles’. That’s what we see on social media; they’re the ones making more of a splash than creating art. It’s great that people can express themselves freely; it’s marvellous that there’s so much freedom of expression – no question about it, of course! Now, it’s simply up to each person’s free will to decide how much, how, and in what context they choose to showcase their work. In the end, things settle down, what needs to be forgotten is forgotten, and finally the chaff is separated from the wheat.

WIN Gallery: Your exhibitions are true declarations of love for the beauty in the world we live in. What is that secret wish you’d like to fulfil one day?

Lisandru Neamțu: I still wish – as a ‘young rising star’ at the age of 56 – to have the time, energy and inspiration to make the most of this studio-workshop for as long as possible and to the greatest possible benefit. Indeed, it is at this age that artistic maturity begins in its fullness. The ability and stamina to work for as long as possible – that is how my innermost wish can be summed up. I had another wish whilst I was at university: to create a monumental complex featuring murals and mosaics, just like the ones I saw in Italy when I was a student. And I managed to do it: somewhere in Bucharest there is a church, ‘Doamna Oltea’, on which I worked for about 15 years, and I am delighted and proud that I was able to realise this vision. And, in the same optimistic vein, I hope that I will have the strength to fulfil the wish I expressed earlier.