Christ 

Curator: This evocative piece, simply titled "Christ," is a mixed media work that appears to employ watercolor, drawing, and painting techniques. It is made by Sorin Dumitrescu. What are your first impressions? Editor: Austere, almost shockingly so. It’s raw, visceral… and the earth-toned palette feels particularly resonant given the subject matter. One is immediately aware of the sparseness of the medium employed to make this, so vulnerable. Curator: Indeed. Dumitrescu has achieved a powerful sense of vulnerability through these sheer watercolor washes. You also get the feeling that we see the artist sketching this piece out with lines as part of the painting, which makes me see his way of exploring the work while in progress. There’s a certain agony palpable. It’s stripped bare, both figuratively and literally given its nudity. Editor: The visible marks indicating form and placement really amplify that sense of "becoming". You're absolutely right, this seems so process-driven. Is this some deliberate rejection of lavish artistic tradition that he, as an artist, can no longer associate himself with? Where does this feeling stem from, would you suggest? Curator: It feels more like a deconstruction. A desire to grapple with the core of the figure and narrative free from centuries of ornamentation. Stripping down religious iconography to its very essence perhaps. To be so simple but honest is not often explored today. Editor: Yet it makes a grander, more salient argument about mortality in its fragile construction than if Dumitrescu were to take up traditional religious art. Its ephemeral medium is in close conversation with our physical limitations and our material relation to life itself. In the work of creating life, in turn we can appreciate and expect death too. Curator: I agree. There's also something incredibly intimate about it. Like witnessing a private moment of contemplation. Or perhaps it is seeing an icon made accessible? Editor: In using such a simple palette and medium, Dumitrescu implicates himself in something much larger than he is, something from which we ourselves derive. From just watercolor! This work speaks volumes about production and how important materials and their properties are, for expressing an individual truth through a communal narrative. Curator: Beautifully put. For me, this artwork becomes like an encounter – a quiet, starkly human representation capable of stirring profound reflection, a way for each to explore their feelings about being and self in the larger sense of the universe. Editor: Indeed. And considering those basic and unvarnished, means and materials that facilitated such feeling—makes the work an ode to the relationship of life and form and expression—a testament to our existence as producers and makers, who are ultimately beings that also leave a legacy of things behind us too.