Art Critics

Over his lifetime the artist had multiple segments of inspiration, somehow different in expression and color. From the "Roots" and "Fortress" cycles, he turned to using characters and symbols. From dark, grayish colors, the artwork turned into one full of vivid colors with a great chromatic. Every painting has a message that is forwarded to the viewer using mixed media and usually acrylic paint. 

 

Adrian Samson’s creation starts from two quintessential elements of the Romanian ancestral civilization: wood and stone. The painter brings out their symbolical value and their inner coded messages who are praised in poetry and music for centuries since Romanian language has been spoken in that area of the European culture.                                                                                                   Academician, prof. Dan Grigorescu

Adrian Samson opened his first private show in Bucharest at Eforie Art Gallery, displaying artworks that belong mainly to his latest cycle of oil paintings and colored drawings, entitled “Roots”. The theme itself sprang naturally, once he had finished the previous cycle, “Fortresses”. Adrian Samson definitely knows when and where to make use of the abstract Expressionism. His art exhibition was the evidence of his thorough artistic approach that undoubtedly ranks Adrian Samson among the artists whose art deserves lively interest in and further special consideration. Arta Magazine no.10, 1989, Mihai Ispir

Talking about an artist who researches into the essence of a thematic cycle, in this case “Roots”, Adrian Samson definitely joins that segment of our art, which is beyond any conceptual and stylistic limits of the postimpressionist traditions and mentalities, thus classifying among the co-authors of the pictorial autonomy. “The root” gets the meaning of an archetype regained mainly if it is judged, as a symbol, in comparison to another possible cycle, the one of the fortress in Deva. The genuine idea of root in its widest meanings interferes with the idea of a historical root, full of optical, ethical and ethnical significations. România Literară Magazine, Virgil Mocanu

Similar to the medieval miniaturist, who used to scrape off the manuscript page just to add different texts and calligrams and turning the sheet into a very complex web, conventionally called “palimpsest”, Adrian Samson considers the virgin field of the paper as a privileged “locus”, a territory of superposition, confrontation or dislocation, as well as deconstruction and separation of the layers of the emotional memory. There is an overlap of physiognomies, visions, areas of the dark and subconscious, alternating with beams of light, in a tensed attempt, in fact a terrible struggle and a transposition of those elements in a pictorial code, often hard to be visible, the evanescent and equivocal one. Quite often, the painter divides the mirror of the image into two or more cores of interest; a main one, which is the existential kernel of the idea expressed by the artwork and some secondary ones, that aim to complete the main one. With regard to chromatic, the distribution of color in various directions and bifurcations, erasures and metamorphoses are meant to intensify a substance that is equally tectonic and fragile, appropriate to that extremely exquisite issue, a real challenge for any artist. If we interpreted Adrian Samson’s creations, “The Memories” and “The Houses”, according to a grid purposely oriented to emphasize the symbols, we would undoubtedly decipher sacred signs, but also some relating to the depth of the human existence, such as the individual kept prisoner in the implacable mechanisms of the history or the myths of construction, of creation as a primordial archetype. George Vida, Art Reviewer, Deputy Director of the “G. Oprescu” Institute of Art History and Theory of Romanian Academy

 

Others to come...