CRITICAL REVIEW

          Influenced, after 1980, by the constructivist researches on the form transposed into plan, he provides a new content to these disciplinary exercises of a lavish matter through the rigor of the rectangular intersections and through the explicit manifestation of a religious perspective granted to the image. His searches consume themselves in the same sphere of minimal signs, but symbolically valorized - the cross, the dot as the center of the world. Sometimes the signs are isolated, other times they are integrated into 
infinite repetitions. Matter also gains a symbolic meaning, frequently quoting the golden background of the icon.

Constantin Prut (2014)
Dicționar de artă modernă și contemporană, ediție în curs de apariție la Editura Polirom, Iași, 2015


           Silviu Oravitzan’s debut works (In my Village, Mioritica) are created with the purpose of recovering and consecrate, using plastic means, the space of his childhood. In this first stage of identifying an original space - a central point that gathers environmental elements with symbolic values -, dominates the descriptive tendencies, necessary of his effort to place in the cosmic 
order. Gradually, the artist sieves the methods of "lecturing" reality, developing, at the same time in the cultural heritage and in the daily activities spheres, a repertoire of signs and symbols that sensitize a fundamental experience - that of the sacred. He removes the routine slag that comes to hide the true aspect of things, in order to bring into daylight deposits of spiritual experience that are "forgotten" or abandoned under the pressure of some mundane emergencies. In some works of the Center (Writings) series, some old runes, archaic tablets bear to actuality "voices" from unfathomable temporal depths.
          Something crucial for his evolution is represented by the research and the insertion in the plastic speech of the radial morphologies, in which solar elements are disclosed in the fundamental solidarity with divinity. Numerous cycles start with the symbolic reality of the center, to which are attached adjacent symbolic values, with various cultural references: Center (The Cross); Center (The Dogmatic Egg); Center (Interferences of Light). The center, with the game of its centrifugal and centripetal energies, represents the manifestation of the divine principle. He is in solidarity with the pillar, with axis mundi, with the sense of communication between the celestial and the terrestrial spaces. The presence of the center, with its radial morphologies, receives distinct meanings, comprehensively and rigorously marked by the artist, in the Instances of the Sign: The Cross and the Square series and, obviously, in those works from the Center series, that are subtitled The Cross. A great diversity of shapes, evoking different cultural values, either from the sphere of Christianity, or from the aria with specific spiritual traditions, transform the cross into the nest of some forces that refer to the dialogue between order and chaos, between lightness and darkness, with the revelation of divinity’s savior presence. Most often, the cross from Silviu Oravitzan’s paintings, drawings and reliefs is the Christian cross, the place of the supreme sacrifice for man’s salvation, for his removal from the mundane frazzle and his reintegration into the heavenly atmosphere.
          In complete solidarity with the meanings of the cross there are the series Codex Aureus and Byzantine Structures, that operate an openness to cultural horizons where a series of sacred architectures, the self-sacrificial spirit, the aspiration for communicating with sacred realities triumph. For constructing these conceptual structures, the artist resorts to appropriate plastic modalities. He uses a game of detail with the ensemble, the resumption of a series of problems in order to fix them, a chromatics that underlines the symbols’ affiliation with the sacred reality. The gold and the black point out the dialogue between chaos and order, between lightness and darkness, and the colour red evokes the blood of Christ. The solar, divine overflow of gold takes 
sometimes (for example in Golden Rain from the Light and Rain series) the form of a rain that links the sky with the earth, showing the transition from the celestial Jerusalem to the terrestrial one. One can notice the full unity between idea and image, between conceptual values and the plastic discourse. With an evolution that surpasses the careful recording of the visible reality (especially in her natural dimension) and, later, the jubilation of the free gesture, independent of form, but depending on matter, Silviu Oravitzan succeeded in the last decade to establish an ordering principle as a plastic image. As the previous stages practiced freedom rather with an air of empathy, under no circumstance as an intentional destruction of the shape, the ordering principle present in the late works does not involve the negation of matter, of the substance and of the manifested world’s multiplicity either. The sky - defined through circle, cross, other radial morphologies - is the meeting place between the principle of unity and the one of the infinite fragmentation in concreteness.Sometimes, one finds himself in front of some fields in which a model is produced unlimitedly, but upon which operates at a certain spatial moment the shape that encloses and imprints the tension to the center. Other times, the center is the one that radiates towards the peripheries of the image tensions that engage the substance. Besides this game of centrifugal and centripetal forces, in the intimate structure of the painting matter the same theme can be found at the level of each module, subjected to the general aspiration towards the center. In this place occurred the mutation from the enthusiastic analysis of the visible world and the exaltation of the subject before the concreteness, to a type of uniformity that only retains their memory. It is the memory of a heavenly splendor that gives matter the same prestige as the form. Each time, at the end of the road, matter encapsulates light, it aims at golden shades, it announces itself as a fertile instance of light. The moment it becomes light, without canceling or exorcizing phenomenal richness, but rather transfiguring it, matter itself coincides with the center. It is recognizable in this condition of the image a sacred vision more profoundly engaged that in the option for a repertoire of signs which, evidently, belong to a sacred language. We find ourselves in front of a metaphysical art that searches, as many contemporary approaches 
directed towards this vertical spiritual axis, the convincing expression for the modern sensibility of this type of experience. Silviu Oravitzan is one of the cultural personalities whose presence was decisive in the last decades, not only through his own work, but also through his activity as an organizer of the artistic life in Lugoj, a town that became, with his help, one of the reference points in the Romanian cultural geography. He has the merit to register the west side of the country in the large European cultural circuits, a movement in which he engaged himself with his own significant work, relevant for the mood of the époque.

Constantin Prut (oravitzan.ro)