ADRIAN IONITA

by Mihai Driscu

“Molehill” copyright 1978, Adrian Ionita As a sculptor, in the traditional meaning of the word, Adrian Ionita proves – despite the rarity of concrete examples – a serious knowledge about portrait, composition with figures, etc. As an investigator about the sculpture’s limits – limits studied just in order to underpass them, by the “annexation” of other zones of potential interest – he belongs to the more rare league of perpetual designers, bestowing the act of drawing (more exactly the nuances of le dessein: 1. design, project, intention and 2. a dessein: adverbial locution, by purpose) as the most economical solution, and so far the most efficient, to express his discontent with the “normality” of the sculpture. Dichotomized with a leg in utopia and the other in the immediate reality, which supplies him with ideas and solutions for a personal concept about sculpture as the most “imperialistic” and “annexionist” of all the arts, Adrian Ionita is self-aware that his modality is not safeguarded from hazards. The first and the most apparent: advancing much faster through design, it is understood that the solutions, always provisional, are suffering – from his point of view – by psychological obsolescence. On one hand , Adrian Ionita is perfectly aware of the possible deadlock of the “artist without a magna opera” ( non-ratification by administrative-organizational reasons is supposedly one aspect) ; by no chance, some drawings are a kind of a survey of his projectional past, he inventories and dates his solutions by “problematic sets”.

On the other hand, he cannot repress himself the delights of design as a self-sufficient process, the search for the search’s sake. Having in view an impressive quantity of drawings – here we see how quantity is converted, more and more evidently, in graphic quality, even though its not his first intention - fused with texts ( from the extremely detailed account of discussions about art, to notes taken from various readings of books about astronomy, geology and hunting – the trap as a plastic event is a favorite theme) we remark a particular example o what was named the circept (the circular concept) of the researcher, used as a transition from an image – as an attribute of another more proximate image, and the absolute antithesis: knowledge – ignorance, investigation- hazard, doubt- conviction, adventure- the plan.

We can distinguish also the application in the artistic practice of prevalent methods in discovery and invention, one of the most frequent – the so called ” Molliere Method” – the plea to the profane (seen as astronomer, zoologist, etc. – Adrian Ionita, wondering under the vault of the heaven, or the “mechanics” of a mole hill, introduces unexpected view points, of high visual interest).In other drawings we find that Adrian Ionita uses the method of the detour, the studying of some phenomena in order to understand other phenomena (what is named “lateral thinking”) while in other drawings he is using the method of limit-cases, of the caricature, of signalizing through markers, or the study of phenomena belonging to related fields, the so called method of ” No Man’s Land”. Useless to underline the fact that all this methods are undergoing “mixtures” and various fusions during the project’s flow.

We insisted especially upon the “what” of Adrian Ionita’s ideatic drawings, neglecting the plastic aspect of these numerous attempts of qualification and re-qualification of the space (from the novel – “Columbus’s Egg” of the reflections inside the sculpture – to the ineffable – the attempt to suggest the “presence of an absence”). The hardworking thinking of the author about the sculpture’s enrichment possibilities can be placed under the sign of Albert Einstein’s aphorism “the imagination is more important than knowledge”

from Arta magazine, Nr. 4/1983, Bucharest, Romania