In a recent feature article in The New York Times Magazine, the contemporary Russian novelist Victor Pelevin spoke of how "In the Soviet times you could escape from the evil of the state by withdrawing into the private spaces of your own head. " It was common, Pelevin explained, for thoughtful people to live in a state of "inner exile", to withdraw from the pressures of totalitarianism by a kind of "willed alienation", to seek an "inward freedom of prayer and mediation," and to live "in a world inside their heads".

Few, if any, Soviet bloc citizens, however,, possessed the genius to create an inner world quite so elaborate and magical as that of the celebrated Romanian painter Sabin Balasa, who recently visited the United States with his son Tudor Balasa, also a well-known artist in their native country, and talked with Gallery&Studio through an interpreter.

The apartment in midtown Manhattan where we met both the father and the son belonged to Ildiko Trien, the former publisher of the Fire Island News and a long time collector of Sabin Balasa's paintings. We spoke surrounded by his fantastic images of nubile female nudes in unearthly dreamscapes, evoked in a meticulous realist technique.

Besides being one of the most important living artists in Romania. the acknowledged master of "Cosmic Romanticism", Sabin Balasa, who was born in 1932, is a highly acclaimed novelist and the creator of an innovative genre of film utilizing animated paintings. He has executed important mural commissions in his native country, and is in private, corporate. and museum collections throughout Europe and the U.S., including the Picasso d'Antibes Museum, and the collection of the White House, in Washington, D.C. He is also the only living artist to have designed postage stamps for the Romanian government, and he has won numerous awards at home and abroad.

Yet Sabin Balasa’s public recognition was gained at high personal cost. Seconding the sentiments of the Russian writer, Peeving, the Romanian painter speaks of the inner strength it takes to survive in a totalitarian system and not be corrupted by the state. Fortunately, he says, he had the example of his father, a dissident who survived the gulag. They could imprison his father, but they could not imprison the thought, he emerged from the gulag still free in his mind.

Thanks to those same indomitable genes, Sabina Balas a was able to resist the pressure to conform to the clichés of Soviet Realism and to construct a counter world in his paintings, a space, as he puts it "in which to exist, not just survive".

In this rarefied realm, fashioned from the power of imagination, in defiance of the repressive political climate, sprightly young nymphs with flowing locks cavort among fanciful rock formations that mirror the shapes of their fanciful steeds, which appear to be hybrids of horses and sea-lions (as seen in "The Messengers of a New Spiritual Space", the painting reproduced in color on the inside cover of this issue of Gallery&Studio). These Lolita-like female nudes are the most constant protagonists of Sabin Balasa's paintings, which seem to depict an ongoing saga, an elaborately plotted personal mythology. In one painting, a petite nude with long purple hair sits playing a flute astride a white mount with a phallic neck and head and long, powerful humanoid legs and feet in a landscape where day and night meet on separate sides of an icy partition. In another, four identical female nudes preen on a beach where shaggy trees that mirror the texture of the long, flowing hair climb toward the sky, and a winged male figure glides among cottony clouds. In other remarkable canvases, several longhaired Lolitas parade on their phallic steeds in ritualistic-looking processions through heavenly vistas of rocky plateaus and stately trees; a single nude female figure perches on a rock in the company of a huge horned beast, resembling a water buffalo, wading docilely among partly submerged boulders with craggy textures that mirror in own rough hide; an embryonic Venus is hatched from a monolithic gold nugget suspended in mid-air above a terrain of swirling rocks: ghostly nudes dance gracefully in a fiery space behind classical columns in a snowy landscape; a shapely angel with stone wings soars over a mountainous terrain... And on and on it goes, one fantastic image begetting another in a seemingly endless visionary journey. Even a relatively straightforward image of a comely young nude daydreaming by the sea, as seen in "Solitude", the painting in the collection of The White House, is infused with the peculiar narrative power that sets this artist apart.

Certain aspects of Sabin Balasa’s art can be compared to predecessors as diverse as William Blake (the scope of his cosmic vision) and Rene Magritte (his metaphysical transcendence of the laws of matter); yet, the world that he creates is a unique amalgam of philosophy and imagination encompassing the idea of Carl Jung, Rudolf Steiner and various faces of both Eastern and Western spirituality. Sabin Balasa points out that he has built his work “on the fundament of the great art that has come before, and not the flimsy concepts of neoclassicism, postmodernism, or any of the watered down periods from the past to the present”.

Above all, he insists, great art must have a spiritual basis, which seems sadly lacking in the contemporary scene.

"In the modern world, and particularly in America, technology is very advanced, but spirituality has not kept pace with it", the artist says, reiterating the philosophy of Steiner. "To me, the artist is a messenger. It is my dream to live in a world where my work can be a force to move people toward spirituality."

March/April 2000