Dorél Dobocans biography is dramatic and adventurous. Born in the Romanian town of Timisoara in 1951, he first attempted to flee the country at the age of twelve. He was captured and received his first prison sentence. This first attempt to escape did not appear to be politically motivated; it was simply an intuitive declaration of independence by the future artist. While in prison, he received his first lessons in philosophy from his professor cellmate. The Communist regime even kept tabs on teenagers and Dobocan was closely watched by the secret police. He was arrested on other occasions, experiencing many of the horrors of the Ceaucescu regime, until he managed to defect to Germany in 1978.
This tense outline of events might be seen to offer an insight into Dorél Dobocan, interpreting his introversion and predilection for harmony and meditation as a classical example of an artist attempting to overcome external circumstances. While this theory may be outwardly correct, a fuller explanation requires the cultural contexts to be taken into consideration. Although Dobocan faced difficult conditions during his professional establishment and the Romanian art scene was dominated by hardliners, state-sponsored repressions were not so harsh in the arts as they were in other fields of Romanian life or in Soviet art. Movements tracing their roots back to the vibrant avant-garde of the 1920s, when the Romanian Constructivists rallied around such publications as Contemporanul, 75HP and Integral, managed to survive with mixed success. Vestiges of the national Surrealist movement, which arose much later than in the rest of Europe and continued to flourish after the war, also lingered on. Unofficial artists closely followed cultural events in France, home to many leading imigrant artists and writers.
Dobocan was one of those who perceived and reinterpreted the message of French artistic culture. His guideline was the collective image of the Surrea list form, or the version best represented by Rene Magritte and Paul Delvaux, based on non-objectification, the dialectics of the rational and irrational and introvert contemplation (what André Breton called "l´abandon pur et simple au merveilleux"). Dorél Dobocan cannot be accused of borrowing or appropriation. His own optics imparted a special significance and inner dynamism to the image, linked to the processes of the identification
of the magical and the irreal in the real. Dobocan s pastels of the late 1970s and early 1980s are quasiobjective.
The sole aim pursued by the artist was the representation of the objective world. His still-lifes address "the quiet life" of such textbook objective realities of domestic life as bottles, glasses and fruit. Studying this life, Dobocan employed the entire arsenal of means of artistic expression. Working in pastels, he extracted the maximum possible in terms of colour and tonal nuances and the conveying of the warm/cold- gradations. It soon became clear, how ever, that this insistent, forced objectivity was far from being the main content of the image. The content was, in fact, the repudiation of objective representation. Reality is deceptive and incognisable; its existence is not merely confined to the external or the objective. A picture is not a more or less objective reflection of empirical reality, but what the Russian philosopher Pavel Florensky called "magic machine".
How are the mechanisms of the metaphysical instigated? How do the aforementioned Surrealist optics operate? Several typical devices can be pinpointed here. One is the use of standard Surrealist images performing the role of "codeword", leading us into the more profound aspects of the work. Dobocan often includes a pipe in the objective assortment of his still-lifes, recalling Magritte, who employed the image of a pipe to signal the division of the verbal and the visual. This particular device also conjures up associations with the Belgian painters "Ceci n´est pas une pipe" and the essay of the same name by Michel Foucault. Another means of estrangement (the term employed by the Russian formal school) and derealisation is the use of various forms of side-wings, curtains and screens. This represents less a theatricalisation of space and more a transition from one state of mind to another - from the dream-like and the sacral.
Dobocan also employs traditional Surrealist objective realities and processes, directly linked to what André Breton called "intersection of the main magistral of the dream". The list of these meaningfully sublime motifs could go on and on an eye and a tear frozen in mid-air, milk pouring off a table yet never dripping, dice thrown on a table, a rotting fuse wire. All these objective-temporal realities each of which conceals a definite tale and ceremonial of the passage of time directly and effectively transfer the image into the zone of visionary transreality.
Although Dobocan is generally consistent in his choice of subjects, several new motifs appeared in the 1990s - naked female bodies and landscapes. The optics of such works are linked not so much to Surrealism, as to the artists own personal philosophy.Each work is not a fragment of reality, but an integrated picture of the world. The direct reaction to the depicted and "life" and perception in its sensual, tactile parameters recede, replaced by a repeat perception flavoured by a spot of speculation (or inner vision), particularly in the artists landscapes. The colour-spatial structures are arranged in a corresponding fashion. Such works are usually painted not in pastel an essentially hand-worked and sensually tactile medium but in oil.
This allows the artist to convey the cosmic luminescence of the surfaces and the mystical cold of the airless spaces in Midnight (1996) and Rocky Desert (1998). The growth of the meaning and symbolism is reflected in the titles, which are more universal and multi-significant. While retaining the modernist pathetic and spiritual elements, Dorél Dobocans art acquired several aspects of postmodernist reflection. The artist systematised and compiled tab les, herbaria and dictionaries. This orientation perhaps not fully reflected at first, but later increasingly articulated can be seen in the development of the musical theme, which was extremely important for Dobocan. In the course of this theme, the artist systematises all possible -technical and content- approaches. The means of realisation are always correlated to the resources of both vision and selfpositioning, in relation to the artistic phenomena actualised in the context of this positioning. HEre we see both traditional life sketches and the archaic genre of the trompe-l´oeil; versions of found objects and work with the object and material in the spirit of traditional Surrealism, Pop Art and Fluxus. The technical and historico-cultural ammunition is activated with the precise aim of entrenching the various existences of music in visual images. Frozen music, eternal music, music in the soul, concrete music and the music of spheres are all aspects of Dobocan s metaphorical "musical vocabulary", systematising all these concepts and literally begging for added supplementation and development.
Reflected in Dobocans landscapes of recent years, this gravitation towards systematisation can also be sensed in the representation of such works at exhibition. The displays of art are interpreted as graphic tables of landscape insights, meditations and states of mind. I am convinced that Dorél Dobocan will encounter both interest and understanding among Russian art-lovers.
Alexander Borovsky, Chefcurator of Contemporary Art at the State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg