“In his early work Bulacu would use motifs that were intentionally figurative through their exploration of domestic intimacies, albeit more unsettling than the bathrooms of the pop artist Tom Wesselman; then, as if in a museum, he switched to armouries, visited mythical-cultural themes (Cyclops, The Mirror, Metamorphosis, etc.) and then various animal motifs (the skinned sheep, the ram’s head, the Provencal bull, the fish, the snail, the butterfly, etc.). Gradually, the human body became his chief diviner of meanings. After producing the image of the couple with imprisoned bodies he began (during the last decade) to dwell, in an incantatory/Rabelais manner, on the female torso. However, the characteristic feature of his corporeality is severance: the relics/remains turn out, on an artistic level, to be more loquacious. The torsos of seductive women are put together from extensive floral/carnivorous fragments, with amputations and contorsions of breasts (e.g. the comprehensive series of The Conceited Women). The fragmentation of the body overloads the severed sections with meaning. A severed hand, intruding on the image, becomes the title element “hand” in surrealist vein.” – Aurelia Mocanu
“The female body appears under various guises, from the primitivist, reminiscent of prehistoric idols of fertility, to those of a stirring, fresh sensuality defined in terms of the full curves of the drawing and the chromatic “signals”, be these intense or, on the contrary, subdued. (…) The act of love is not absent from the artist’s work. Aurel Bulacu has made an important contribution to lifting the taboo surrounding erotic depiction in contemporary Romanian art.” – Adrian Guță
Bilingual edition (Romanian-English)
Coordinator: Aurelia Mocanu
Graphic design: Claudia Tache
Texts by: Aurelia Mocanu, Doina Pădulean, Adrian Guță
English version: Samuel Onn
286 p.
