Publicist, Curator and Editor – Mihai Hurezeanu
“Oscar Iustin from Timisoara, a cosmopolis at the crossroads of the West and the East, the Levant and the Balcans, being nourished by this vibrant urban energy, is a maverick photographerartist with a very unique and genuine approach to the feminine nude body.
His show couldn’t be seen anymore in Sibiu in this dark spring because of State of Emergency caused by corona virus, so we commited here to a review of an art show foretold. I did this with enthusiasm and trepidation because I have found his work as premonitory of this tragic state of disconnection with nature andquiet desperation enclosed in the sorrowful beauty of these exiled nimphes, his models.
They pose in redemptive postures like some palimpsest signs of a fulgurating gnostic vision, among brooks, rocks, and waterfalls like some enchanted portals to be open of the Mother Earth.
His vision is not rough and primitive although it addresses the terrifying avatars of the scorned Nature. He approaches the Nature and female body with tenderness, kindness and compassion. His ecumenical vision reconciles the political paradigms of feminism and enviromentalism with the spiritualist one of the New Age, Earth stewardship. This is why, I think even the vigilante public intellectual, guardian of liberal cultural tenets, the late Susan Sontag, the author of reference treaty” On Photography”, the one who came down very harshly in her notorious essay “Fascinating Fascism” against nature worship as fascist longing, would be accepting the unobtrusive sweet-melancholy metaphysics of Oscar’s photographic quest.
His style of mise-en-scene is very deliberate part baroque part nervous pop fashion impresario style. His modus operandi reminds me of Gregory Crewdson who confessed in an interview for Aperture Conversations that: “Preproduction is great because it’s all about dreaming” Oscar’s female nude bodies transcend the sensual plenitude and craving through a dreamwoven blackand white texture. “
