Critical References
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.