CRITICAL REVIEW

          A sculptor who debuted in the ‘80s, at the same time with the establishing of Neo-expressionism, depending on a figuration characterized by the intensity of the physiognomic cues and by the shape’s tensed regime, by the, even unsystematically, recourse to colour as an expressive supplement and to the strategies of the formal/volumetric hybridizations with a systematic contribution. The reconsideration of an anthropocentric figurative art is produced in the moment of detachment from using the formal technologies and systems of the rustic instrumentation, as a referential source, of great circulation in the 9th  decade, even though the borrowing is minimal, partial, as a technology or a typology of materiality. The favourite theme of Mircea Roman’s sculptural creation, at the level of formal syntax, is represented, in this stage, by the articulation of a bust - preponderantly feminine, opulent and intense, as far as the rhetoric of the presence goes, and an ample open shape, constructed in a discreet geometrized manner. This module, constructed from identical repetitive elements, is also composed with other individualized human fragments, but the feminine figure dominates the series in which the expressionist figurative art overlaps the free geometrics specific to the previous formal style. The most appropriate material of this stage’s formal montage is represented by wood. The human figure remains the centre of the sculptor’s preoccupations, but the expressive regime changes, adapting to the new thematic of the angelic instances. The figures closer to the Byzantine slender canon belong to a calophile vision of an androgynous grace and a retained gestural repertoire which has a tendency towards sanctimony. The dynamism contained by the predominantly static form, of a horizontal (still in the "sitting women" series) or vertical (in the angels series) monumentality, follows the differences between these moments of his evolution. The materials he resorts to permit the involvement of colour as complacent supports, and also the eloquence of the line that closes the volume. An elegance that quotes the Florentine mannerism substitutes the expressionist rhetoric.

Alexandra Titu (2014)