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Techniques

Techniques

OIL: easily recognized by the vigorous strokes of paint molded on the canvas, created by the use of a palette knife. The paint is forced to adhere to the canvas through rapid, straight or wavering movements of the variously shaped blades of differently sized palette knives. The result is an infinitely modulated surface of oil paint, composed of innumerable colors and tones that become like the pixels of the pictorial substance. As final outcome, the oil paste is tumultuously transformed in a relief whose plains and heights, valleys and mountains of color tell, in the most sensitive way, the stories of the chosen images that the artist fell in love with.

PASTEL: a perfect reaction of homogenously melting colorful earths takes place in the pastel paintings of Radu Serban. On the surface of the finest paper, the chalky sticks of color draw using ample waving motions combined with traces, which explain the most unexpected hatch-like patterns working in perfect synchrony with the very color of the paper background. The resulting work resembles an overlapping of multiply layered colorful scribbles. The density of lines of different widths and values is masterfully weighed in such a way that it allows the eye of the onlooker to still read the component elements of the colored paper and multicolored earths.

DRAWINGS: the ink pen sketches of Radu Serban have the sensitivity of a seismograph. They appear to be a continuous, spontaneous flow of the black liquid on the white of the paper.