Iulian Bisericaru’s latest artistic residency at the International Summer Residency Aschersleben in Germany provided the opportunity of purveying different layers of historicity, while also enabling a visual comparison with the rich Germanic influences of the area he grew up in, around southern Transylvania and Sibiu. From the medieval architecture of nearby Leipzig towns to the uncommon art-nouveau architecture of the Heldenstadt, to the transitory, clear lines of 1980s foreign bus-stations and mundane blocks of flats, everything coalesced in a familiar, yet entirely disparate landscape. The uncanny made room into Iulian Bisericaru’s mind and it rendered striking, poetic images of mixed architectural narratives interrupted by glitches of acid, bright colours. Strangely tamed vegetal patterns stand aghast nature unleashed – in its midst, we make due with the chaos of habitation and the almost painful absence of any human presence. We follow Iulian Bisericaru’s footsteps to the core of his artistic research which consists of depicting singular buildings as a challenge to their environment. Architecture that is caught in
between anticipating future developments and negotiating their complicity with either their historical or ecological functions. Iulian Bisericaru, in his latest painting, imagines a place for the last days of Motherwell – a false memory, or as real as it could have been? By juxtaposing the Richard Diebenkorn American inspired blue-skies, the Russeau references of lush vegetation, the German romanticism reflected in the sceneries he creates, Iulian Bisericaru renders no-where spaces with a multitude of “I-know-where” places. They exist, they are recognizable as such, and yet they form abstraction in a reversal mapping process, draw distances to every other solitary space.