he eldest son of a Romanian farmer, Ioan Nemtoi (Trusesti, Botosani, 1964) graduated in 1991 from Art Academy in Bucharest with a Bachelor of Arts in Ceramics, Glass and China: he wanted to study sculpture but, finding the course full, he “accidentally” stumbled into the glass department. Pensively he remarks “glassmakers fall in love with their chosen medium, but really it chooses them!” Known from art criticism, from the press, or from the web, but especially from the numerous exhibitions in Romania and abroad, Nemtoi is an artist with a remarkable evolution in the decorative and monumental art. Critics have often associated him with famous names in the field, such as Dale Chihuly, William Morris or Lino Tagliapietra, being appreciated in New York, Montreal, or Tokyo, as one of the most productive and original East-European creators. His art combines freely figurative and abstract elements, archetypal and unconventional forms, color and transparency. His approach to glass transforms an age-old art that has been considered ‘minor’, into a modern and flexible form of expression, combining sculpture, installations and environment interventions. About his work, Nemtoi says: “Glass is not only art, it is also craft. The one who blows and shapes out of incandescent substance forms varying from classical to bizarre, coloured or transparent, with arabesques or gold insertions is a craftsman. This is how I started, by learning the techniques of Murano and Bohemian glassblowers, and than the innovations brought by Art Deco and Art Nouveau, and finally what influenced me most was the Scandinavian experience with the Kosta Boda works. Yet, I don’t want to stop at the point of craftsman, I am not interested in achieving the effect by all means. Beauty is inherent to the art of glass, but I am trying to exploit it at a higher level, to reach an aesthetic category less comfortable: “the beautiful that uneases” called “sublime”.
If we go back to the beginnings of European art, the Greeks did not make the distinction between art and craft: thus fashioning a chair, a sculpture, a piece of music or a temple were technai (crafts). The concept of art as we understand it today was a romantic invention whereby the ‘making’ of art became a process of ‘artistic creation’ connoting an additional dimension to do with talent, genius, creativity, etc., never-mind the hard work and amounts of sweat which have not changed this process since the Antiquity. Says Nemtoi: “The connoisseurs of the vitreous matter know that, in the history of glass, the materials, the techniques and the shapes repeat themselves, since the ancient Egyptians, Phoenicians, Syrians and Romans, to the Murano or Bohemian glassblowers, only the aesthetic and functional perspectives are different. If you look at the modern and the contemporary forms of glass, you notice that since Kaspar Lehman, George Ravenscroft and Anna Roemers Vischer to J. Kunckel and the tens of glassblower-dynasties of Murano, Granja, Bristol or Baccarat, even the Waldglass, verre de fougère, or pâte-de-verre – they have all lived in the tradition of ancient and medieval forms. Not even the 19th – 20th centuries, with the Nancy school or the Art Nouveau and Art Deco movements haven’t approached totally different lines from the models. But there appeared famous names like Emile Gallé, the Daum brothers, René Lalique or Tiffany, who knew to innovate taking advantage of all the previous achievements. In the art of glass the term “unique” has to take into account all the variations of tonality and chromatic scale, light, transparency and density effects – for which there is no “control device”. The analysis of glass is like a taste of fine spirits with tactile, optical and sonorous virtues that the uninitiated misses. I don’t create two identical works of art: the techniques, the shapes and colors may be the same, but the concept, the symbols and significances, the effects attained by light, contrast, the play of bright-mat surfaces are not repeatable and are connected to a higher level of understanding.”
The result is something unique, able to relate with the observer thanks to its own specificity: “If art is a language, it means at the same time communication and significance within the framework of a common semantic and visual code; and the spectator is challenged not only to understand, but also to assign a meaning within an “open interval” specific only to authentic art. This is why I chose several themes that I would not call “fundamental” but rather “universal”, religiousness whether Christian dogmatic or pantheistic being a constant of human being and existence in history. The creation of an artist who aspires to universality, shouldn’t identify with a determined topos (here et nunc), but to offer the possibility for interpretation and decrypting on several levels, so that, taken out of its current context and alienated, it outlives new approaches and visual associations. Moreover, I wanted to show that the art of glass still has unexpected potential, that it can be converted to narration and symbol, reflecting the presence and meaning of divinity in tangible forms.”
”This is why my installations (…) are no more a facile playing of the vitreous matter with light and color, but aggressive morphologies, a tensioned play of volumes, surfaces, and massiveness and hollowness. Glass is today an open subject, at the frontier of architecture, painting and sculpture, but also of the new media. And I particularly wish to be problematic, to deliberately break the rules and conventions, to create monumental art out of a fragile substance, to seduce by the force of the idea and imagination.“ Surely Ioan Nemtoi is no admirer of the tradition kept up for centuries by the Italian masters or, to put it more clearly, of that tradition attempting to turn every object into a fragile, weightless and diaphanous. His works are pictorial, monumental and convincing, sometimes a little bit too overdone, anyway earthly and strongly present. The color eruptions sometimes come in every exhibit as lustrous and simple forms and as more organic and elaborate items other times. The smaller works, the installations, the big size works and the portraits provide a good picture of the multiple faces that a glass artist should have.
Relating to his material and technique in a unique manner, with the accurateness of a researcher and the romantic exaltation of a utopian and creator of fictional worlds, Nemtoi defeats matter’s resistance, technical boundaries, the ties of his art and the common prejudices. Approaching, with the innocence one finds only in great creators, the frail delicate world of glass he succeeded in a short while to articulate a new artistic, ethic and spiritual reality by means of technical data and continuous force of fire. He questions the metaphysical position of the solitary creator suspended in a world which seems to be finalized, settled for all times in an undisturbed order and brings everything back to the amorphous state of the beginning, rediscovers the spontaneous energy of combustion, identifies air and light and sets out to organize all. Glass becomes raw material and completed material, mineral support and vital substance, firm as meteor rock, fragile as the slightly perceptible seed and fluid as a leave of grass. It sits as humble as the sand, becoming earth, or on the contrary, rises with unsuspected energy and comes to be complex installation architecturally endowed with a sacred call. Because finally that’s what Ioan Nemtoi does: puts life into abstract glass, extracts positive energies out of the liberated ravishing force of fire and changes workshop’s animation into alchemic scenario and ceremonial service. It takes only one step to live the mystic revelation … or it has been taken already.
http://www.nemtoi.com
