Cătălin Pîslaru

“Premeditated flight of an innocent bird”
Nir Altman, Munich
2019

It is as if many roads would intersect one another, or could find the one way which functions as a key-path to more unexplored directions, yet well-known and connected. Those paths are all confident with one another, all flying towards a destination that is an origin, a starting point. The new works by Catalin Pislaru hold anthropomorphic features in between biology and architecture, where the organic gains cuneiform shapes. It appears as being angular, full of vertexes, and seems assembled to the pictorial work as never before. This architectural evolution seems to point at the direction of flight, where metaphoric arrows become varnish and the chromatic palette enhances the dash. The figurative idea seems to be disentangled and even more conscious. Science fiction is behind the corner, where the border between man and bird and what is beyond the sky, gets thin. Now, the lines seem to draw maps that kiss constellations. The matter in the pictorial gesture, which was once much more persistent but still remains, is now much lighter as the colour seems to have studied the laws of aerodynamics. This gesture holds an aspect that is both premeditate and light-hearted, as the title of the show suggests – precisely: “Premeditated flight of an innocent bird”. Pislaru’s work was always on the move between these two aspects. The figurative, an assumed idea which is there before the brush touches the surface, is an a priori that shapes itself and spontaneously finds form in the only moment where the contact has taken place. These forms that seem to soar upon surfaces and space already know where they are going, even though they might seem naive in their reaction once the destination is reached. The destinations of such a flight are, in fact, the more familiar ones: every journey is a return, and it is finalised to find the way of return. Perhaps, this new cluster of works shows a hidden melancholy: Pislaru’s abstract neatness appears more emotional, it is looking for the point of contact with the origin, with a first “why” that already entails the answer, which is all in the experience of the journey and in the vision of its suspension.

Text by
Domenico de Chirico

Scientific Advisory Panel
“Avestrospheryus”

Some birds never land on Earth, they fly higher than all other beings. They are the only species of the “Avestrospheryus” order. A species of animals that, although are currently unable to fly below the level of the earth’s exosphere, have existed since prehistoric times. These birds show an extremely intelligent and
social behavior.

The Avestrospheryus has a hydrodynamic form. Its wings constantly reposition to the rhythm of mathematical equations and its silver conical feathers help it blend in perfectly with the bodies of the universe.

The females have the unique ability to transform themselves into spaceships for the duration of a thousand years. These spaceships are fluid, mostly composed of stellar fiber and other components unknown to modern science. The crew is incognito, but a black and white destroyed photograph from the past still tries to portray them. It shows only one man in an environment similar to our world. Those who have seen the photograph confirmed that in this one man it was possible to identify oneself, one’s mother, one’s first love, one’s first enemy, and Earth’s humanity in its entirety. The experts agreed on a fake.