Artistic Presentation

Boccaccio’s Decameron on 100 Etching Interpretations by Petru Rusu
by Dan Hãulicã -Honorary President of the Art international Critic Association A.I.C.A.

In Petru Rusu’s engravings for Boccaccio’s Decameron, the twisted frenzy of the bodies arouses an impression of true release. It is a release that breaks limits, avoiding the difference between styles, social situations and historical-geographical sites. They are not “illustrations” confined to a particular moment of the European history: although within the images there are some allusions to the fashion of that age, a sort of set-designing care, everything wrapped around a dance of vitality that doesn’t want to accept stylistic appearances. In the end, the sensation we have is a dépaysement deriving from this attitude, not from a method. A dépaysement that is not a metaphorical book learning distance, but an aspiration for the totality that excludes pedantic philological discriminations.

While he was setting up his exhibition, an Italian pointed out some similarities with Chinese art. Someone else found analogies with the vivid chromatic of the popular Mexican engravings. Nevertheless, the exoticism of Petru Rusu’s images comes from a sort of poetic latitude, from a distance that he assumes in front of the narration of the facts. It is -at the most-the same exoticism used by Boccaccio when he imagined Saladin traveling around the Christian world, around Lombardy, to test the hospitality and the magnanimity of the same people he wanted to fight.