"The world of Dorin Coltofeanu, because talking only about his painting represents a drastic limitation of our own freedom of movement and perception, is one of the most confusing and paradoxical phenomena in our contemporary art. If we were to make an inventory of the possible reading grids that could be applied to it, placing ourselves properly under the bondage of memory and our visual stereotypes, we would not have enough of the entire geography of European art, nor the historical time for an exhaustive reading. When you think you have found its stylistic matrix, formal affinities and temperamental compatibilities, then it slips through your fingers, camouflages itself imperceptibly, passes with fine acts on territories still unexplored and throws behind, like in the magical scenarios of fairy tales, all kinds of deceptive appearances.

At first glance, Coltofeanu is a good studio artist, a typical workshop, in turn, for the entire tradition of easel painting in which the entire specific repertoire can be found: landscape, still life, portrait, compositions, genre scenes, architectures, allegories etc. And so on The elementary, but also essential, condition for identifying such diversity of gender and iconography can be found in the figurative expression, in the classical-Renaissance convention and in the imprint that direct experience has fixed in our memory.



From here, from this first level of perception, Coltofeanu's adventure and our drama of unprepared viewers really begins; the whole appearance of figuration and the whole iconographic discourse collapses at the first real touch of the world thus imagined. What appears to be intelligible form and description easily identified and processed by the mechanisms of memory is, in fact, mere illusion, a spectral organization, imponderable and incorporeal. In Coltofeanu's world, existence ceases to be based on matter, it becomes an effigy, spirit and eternal aura through the transfiguration of the flesh and through the reverse restoration of the Expulsion route; Being, in all its diversity and in all its poses, withdraws from history and recovers its paradisiacal nature. And from here, from this moment, the reading of Dorin Coltofeanu's world, an ambiguous, spectral and mystical world, becomes possible. He subtly plays with the illusions of the West only to open access and make our inner reality visible, but also to reveal the spiritual nature of the East, the Byzantine and the Extreme in equal measure."

Pavel Șușară