Alexei Colîbneac’s series of self-portraits

Abstract

Alexei Colîbneac is one of the notorious graphic designers of the national art. Many distinctions and the presence of works in important public collections are proof of the artist’s mastery and of the intellectual message of his artistic discourse. In his imposing creation, we notice numerous series of drawings; one of them being the series of self-portraits, which was not exploited in theoretical studies. Researching the history of value appreciation of the artist’s creation, we found an impressive number of periodicals and publications, but too few scientific. In the series of self-portraits, on which the artist worked at different stages of his life, we see the author in a wide variety of states of mind and spirit. Based on these works, we trace the formation of the artist’s personality: from adolescence, youth, to maturity, in which A. Colîbneac fully demonstrates the ability to ask complex questions of an existential nature or to show slight self-irony, drawing some compositions as if joking. The drawings are made in various techniques of graphics, also the artist uses different languages for dealing with form and space, in some works strictly linear, in others using chiaroscuro. When the observer and the subject are the same person, the spectator witnesses an intimate monologue that constitutes an act of self-knowledge through plastic language.