Bernea's columns in Eminescu's space

The opening of "Mihai Eminescu" museum in Ipotesti occasioned other special cultural events as well. Besides the granting of the Commemorative Medals "150 years since Eminescu's birth," the Horia Bernea exhibition reunited many personalities that attended the festivities. Further from his "Hill," "Garden," "Oval," "Food," "Flag," now Bernea displays "Columns," all the way up to infinity. As he usually says, these forms have just "emerged" in order to support a compact universe, of a stout materiality. There are old columns, fastened into church walls, columns ruling over dusty mansions, columns shining in the night, columns cheering up living spaces, columns organised in an abstract manner or columns with porches full of flowers. The form, reoccurring in every single item, is the centre of a world teeming with senses. The sensuality of Bernea's world, made up of tiny pieces of worlds naturally interconnected, cannot be mistaken here. So many oils on the canvas, in heavy-substance colours, are waiting to be "wolfed down," in a subtle act of co-substantiation. The thinnish column purifies the air. Placed at the beginning of the world, the column rules and upholds. "Bernea's reality is a transparence of reality: not a presence itself, but the spot of a presence. Such a reality cannot be reached by the straight sensuality of the sight, but by study. And the study itself is not seen as an intellectual dissection, but as an active expectation of a revelation," Andrei Plesu was saying. Bernea is preoccupied with a gradual revelation, enriched in every way. Thus, he becomes all-inclusive. Horia Bernea was born in Bucharest, on September 14, 1938. He first graduated the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Bucharest University, then the Technical School of Architecture in the same city. Between 1956-1977 he was a member of the group from Poiana Marului. He started his career as an artist in 1965, together with Paul Neagu and others, within the Youth Festival of the Plastic Artists Union.