There are professional artists and amateur artists.
The difference is not what's written on their diplomas, but what is painted on their canvases.
A good artwork will always remain a good work of art and a bad one will remain forever a bad work. Is the only thing that matters in front of an artwork, the rest is silence, and if there is no silence, it's stupidity and madness.
Acknowledged among the artists in Alba Iulia, Mircea Năstase is a prolific and tenacious plasticist with a remarkable exhibition record and already has a fully-fledged artistic language, distinguishing him in the contemporary Transylvanian art landscape.
Color is the main feature of his works. The painter explores, operates, masters and harness color in all its registers, emotional, visual, but also compositional. For him, painting is the color developing in all its magnitude, actually conducting and shaping, then, as a consequence, the light becomes a feature of color. Without escaping from the figurative, Năstase condenses it through the suggestive lapidary, often sketching it to the visual concision, to the formal pretext of the vibrant color that obviously dominates composition and form, pushing them to the edge of abstraction. The vigorous, juxtaposed, impassioned strokes emphasize the vitality of contrasts, rephrasing the constructive approach and the symphony of the ensemble.
As a fauvist color painter, admirer of Matisse and Derain, resembling to Nicolas de Stael, the painter also partially adheres to the intimate atmosphere of Pallady's interior scenes, sometimes banishing the line, sometimes adopting it as a thick contour (Pallady and, also, Ciucurencu), not only to define shapes, but especially to delimit fields and chromatically matched surfaces. Nastase is always focusing attention to a center of gravity which requires the distribution of stage props and greatly contributes to concentration, balance and the compositional-chromatic unity of the assembly.
It is known that fauvism (despite the name) is the French, less "wild," aggressive and interrogatory expressionism. Thus, in the paintings of the painter of Alba Iulia we will find tougher, expressionist pressures, the visual being often metamorphosed by interventions that distort the conventional image, amplifying its arbitrary-subjective coordinates. The "local color" often falls victim to the major chromatic architectures that alter its true size, assimilating the expressiveness of contrasts, replacing the graceful shade, pastel and halftone games with the augmentative chromatic intensity. Like the "real mimetic" anamorphosis, the space from the traditional "geometrical" perspective is also transformed into a conjugated alternation of colored planes and surfaces, in a perspective, abbreviated sequence, moving from the advancing to the background. Approaching all genres, landscapes (rural, urban, industrial, marine, camp or forest), nudes, static natures, portraits... all the works of Mircea Năstase emanate from a certain tension, volcanic intensity, strong will to show the personal artistic expression, not concessive, on the contrary, heavily intransigent.
However, it should be emphasized that all this complex "direction", this difficult painting mastery score does not take place for the proud highlight of artist's virtuosity and refinement. His endeavor is to convincingly highlight an interior space, an "ego of works", a spirit of reality (sometimes solar, sometimes nocturnal), spiritually assimilated and creatively rendered to others. There is a great deal of revolt, violence and controversy in some of his canvases, but also a gentle contemplation, nostalgic-dreaming in others, a fluid emotional musicality, which the artist reveals beyond his own intentions, which express him as a lyrical, melancholic and sensitive temperament.
VALENTIN MUREȘAN - ART CRITIC AND HISTORIAN.
"In Mircea Năstase's artworks, red contrast placed on a synthetic blue stain, harmonic and static additions, complementary color strength, evoked in heavily pigmented shades, letting tents smoother, are the plastic ingredients of a stylized image structure consisting of large areas of paste over which, balanced, define an interpreted figurative, close to a weighted figurative, legible in the landscape, but with a nuance of the style in the static natures, closer to the modern Romanian painting school. Mircea Năstase does not underestimate the portrait, which he discusses in the context of actual situations or adapts it to contextual contemporaneousness."
ANA AMELIA MĂDĂLINA DINCĂ - ART CRITIC.
MIRCEA NĂSTASE, a painter of a sensible world
Mircea Năstase's painting emphasizes the synthetic surfaces of color and the modernly rendered figurative form, in stylizations that allow plastic motifs a consonance of plastic experiences, leaving to light the beauty of the paste, placed in strong contrasts of pure colors or brushed according to chromatic criteria. The plan of his paintings accumulates bright energies, tones with fine ecclesiastics, carefully studied, the pencil setting bold approaches from a compositional point of view, springing in the modernity of our art. The empathy between the subjects and the plastic thinking of the artist is read in the sensibility of evoking static natures with flowers, of the nude twisted by the interior of a room and reflections of the contemporary society, which Mircea Năstase noted in its immediate proximity, thus becoming a artist of his time. Strong shapes, vibrant like shades, with chromatic preferences focused on the subject, allow the blade space to highlight the alternation of the different areas of the painting and the playful part of the visual approach. The tendencies of space multiplication, the pulsation of the coloristic surfaces, the balance of the registers, the colors given by contrasting or harmonic criteria, highlight the plastic expression of Mircea Năstase, a painter with a spirit of symbolic interpretation of the motives, which proposes a spiritual climate on the path of heredity Romanian School of Modern Painting. On the theme of nude, the artist returns frequently, placing the female body in various compositional contexts, creating an ambiance of silence, mystery, poetry. By realizing logical constructions, which are characterized by the tendency of monumentality of the model, usually presented statically, posing in a beatitude attitude, the painter also conveys a psychological effect often supported by a geometry of the image, a transfiguration of the reality, which urges us at times of reverie. The nuances are a subject of contemplation for Mircea Nastase and have nothing lascivious, being symbolic evocations of the eternal feminine, sensuality can be read in the relation between colors, in the relationship that the artist sets between elements of composition. Strong articulation, sometimes in the foreground, sometimes part of a visual arrangement comprising chairs, cacti pots, static elements in the object's ambiance, nudes are neutralized by the presence of curtains or windows that speak of the artist's desire to multiply space and suggest depths. In static natures, it ordinates the components, respecting the fundamental rules of their placement in the two-dimensional field. There are some works that remind us of Ion Musceleanu's expressionism due to the coloristic and architectural force of the objects, fruits and flowers represented. Voluntarily ordered, they create an intimate climate, where the composition is dematerialized by surpluses, a remarkable weight with the involvement of color in monumentally shaped shapes. Like some mineral balloons, the flowers corolla have consistency. Glasses, bottles, fruit, small colored rectangles, placed vertically to express the work, reappear from time to time, along with apples, pears, the palette of the painter, the window, the chairs, and the nudes. Moments of meditation on beauty are all these paintings of the painter Mircea Năstase, a sensible and rational observer of selected motifs from the imaging area of the workshop, transformed every time, the same space redefining its subjects and changing its thematic register.
ANA AMELIA MĂDĂLINA DINCĂ - ART CRITIC - GALERIA U ART - 2018
MIRCEA NĂSTASE - NATURE, MUSICALITY and RYTHM
In the the landscape area we find Mircea Nastase, but his chromatic explosion reflects a different state of mind and, also, of relation with nature. Mircea's artwork exhibits a rhythm, a beat, sometimes with strong musical accents, sometimes calm and placed in a slower register. His landscapes are like fugitive glances in the distance, where the details fade away to the ensemble, emphasizing a joyful state of delight to watch and feel the space as a whole, as an affective description that reflects the painter's emotions about the represented theme.
Mircea Nastase also brings some compositions with flowers - still natures animated with the power of vibrant colors, which seem to load sensitively each picture. In these artworks, the composition is very important to the painter, because it creates a dialogue between different elements: flower pots and different objects in the environment. His compositions are a form of communication, as a relationship not only between the elements they play but with himself and the viewer. Thus, a fruit, a chair or a musical instrument become elements as important as flower bowls, and together they present a state of joy, comfort and harmony.
MIMI NECULA - art critic - NATURALEȚEA ÎN PICTURĂ EXHIBITION - CULTURAL CENTER FOR U.N.E.S.C.O., BUCHAREST 2018