Not an official artist
         Living his early years in the communist regime of Romania, a police imposed dictatorship that enforced and controlled almost every aspect of every citizen’s existence, Petru was confronted not only with the harsh reality of totalitarianism, lived through political upheaval, deprivation or serious limitation of normal, legitimate rights to free expression or free access to studies, but, later on, he even faced severe censorship of his creation and banishment of his artwork.
         As a notorious dissident he could never become an official artist. Like many other opposing intellectuals and artists, he had to choose to expatriate himself in search for a better and more secure land that would allow his spirit to be liberated and his creation freed from constraints.

Most spectacular personal
Creation Journey
         It is remarkable though, that in spite of oppression, persecution, even imprisonment, which have definitely mutilated his early years, and became an ever lasting trauma which marked his entire future artistic evolution, Petru did never stop to pursue his own artistic vision, and, mostly, never hesitated to undertake one of the most spectacular personal Creation Journey....

Petru’s creation of an incredible pluralism and diversity which almost defies categorization, is spanning over a period that surpasses more than 40 years, happening on different continents and numerous meridians, resulting in the largest ensembles of public fresco, tempera, oil or acrylic murals created in our contemporary times, as well as in a prodigious collection of works, ranging from drawings, watercolors, graphics and mixed media on paper, to oils and acrylics on canvas , carvings and sculptures in formats going from miniatures to monumental, from sacred to secular, from public to residential.
         To cover his Mural Works on this site, two pages have been created, corresponding to sacred and secular projects, trying to give the viewers at least a glimpse into the colossal body of artwork Petru had produced.
         It was only the incredible extension of Petru’s production that delayed for too long the realization of this web site, which cannot, does not intent or succeed, to be exhaustive.

Petru is a visionary
         in who’s mind exist a lot more
        parallel worlds
         and connections to a remote cosmos,
         than we can normally envision.
         His artwork is an ample manifestation of a wide range of stylistic and conceptual concerns which changed along his existence, as he changed countries, regimes, or philosophical preoccupations.
         The artist would always emphasize the importance of the liberty he, at all times assumed, in pursuing new avenues and forms of expressions, switching constantly from a series of paintings to another, alternating constantly mediums, techniques, formats , avoiding with tenacity total devotion to an absolute and definitive personal style, a single medium, theme or domain of exploration.

"A personal style is an insidious and hazardous trap for an artist .
.... It casts in heavy metal one’s efforts to forge ahead, it has the same appeal as a mirage .You spend your entire creative life to be truthful to one single sided facet of the Universe, ignoring the natural inclination of the inner self towards the implicit complexity of creation”... declares Petru...
A personal style is not only an imposition and a denial of sincerity, but rather an incarceration of freedom of creation; it means, most of the times, to become intellectually dishonest.

"As a creator, I am going to be recognizable in my diversity, as others are identifiable for their longstanding, equal, insipid, boring production, or artistic style”
         All the materials that Petru had ever used as a background, have , in time, become a symbolical scene, a theater, if you want, where, an imperious Master of Creation, the artist, himself, presents us a perpetual reconfiguration of everything we thought we knew from our life experience; elusive visions of a universe yet to be revealed, quiet enigmatic Eden Gardens hidden in a few tubes of paint, populations and visitors questioning our physical and mental establishments, splendid illusions in ambiguous dreamscapes, plants and animals challenging the sciences and transgressing the realms in clandestine, secretive ways.
         There is a promise of an alternative consciousness every time you look at one of his paintings in The Visionary Works. A unique force of

imagination would deliberately hijack and project you at a level where you might suffer of an eerie dislocation of reality, but would also give you a premeditated chance to become forever spellbound.          The most compelling aspect of Petru’‘s creation is the uniqueness of his vision invading our visual perception with fresh and never seen before inventions, astonishing combinations or absolutely surprising plastic innovations. Have a look at his “Still lives” series. It is a succinct demonstration of the way he would permanently challenge the truth of the nature, launching a search - with the most well mastered plastic means - for aspects and dimensions that nobody ever knew existed inside the most simple expressions of everyday life like the fruits , or flowers .

         Petru’s paintings engage the viewers in a permanent symbolical, metaphorical and - most of the time - figurative dialog with elements of fantastic and surreal, coming from a fabulous imagination who’s limits go beyond one’s comprehension.

         Visit the page of his Madonnas and Angels; and you’ll discover together with so many others before you, that the subject matter is only an originating pretext for the artist, a starting point of his irrepressible need to unfold his creativity offering the matter yet another possibility to magically transform itself into another object of adoration or enchantment.
         Not a single Madonna would resemble the other. No one angel would duplicate another one. Not a single icon would ever be a copy of another one already created, as none of his cathedrals or churches representing again and again the same iconographical program would ever imitate a precedent one. Petru could never stereotype his creation, a coping machine never found a place in his brain

No matter how diverse Petru’s artistic production is, one would easily notice
his persistent recourse to the figure.

         Despite the vast and elaborate versatility of Petru’s entire creation, there is a leitmotiv that one would repeatedly encounter throughout his such extensive oeuvre. Most of his works are centered around the human figure which, according to his own statements, represents not only the essence of creation, but also is, in the artist’s conception, the most complex, and esthetically provocative subject of representation.
         The human figure is the ultimate philosophical stone of any plastic representation, says the artist. While it remains the quintessential principle of beauty, it is the only subject that performs in art a secularization of transcendental, making visible the apotheosis of primordial creation.
         ... and this is why I am coming from your future ...continues Petru: it is a future where a new humanism will be rediscovered, where humans as the symbolical bearers of the most grandiose secret of creation, would harmonize once again with themselves, and with the truth of their own representation.
         One can rationalize that the presence of such a massive crowds of population appearing in many of his most complex figurative paintings, eluding most of the time any explicit statements, corresponds to a triumphant metaphysical concept of beauty in fact, a personal decision of the artist to contribute his own non-dissimulated spiritual experience to the transubstantiation of most of these enigmatic figures into some transcendent, cryptic configurations.
         It is a mystifying parallel and also virtual reality, one of the thousands probably available out there, that Petru decided to bring to us “ in a visual interpretation ” from the Future, directly into our temporary and precarious Present.
         Petru’s visions are far from being only simple propositions of enchanting and intriguing settings or figures. In reality, most of the times, a unexplainable complexity abounds in Petru’s paintings... Thematically - complexity - is, probably, the ever lasting epicenter of his creation.
         Yes, complexity, as opposed to simplicity ( so obsessively inculcated in the majority of contemporary artistic efforts)...that equals only nothingness or nullity. It is complexity, as well, that Petru brings to us from our future.
         Future - that <lieu> in our minds projection, where not only dreams, but also other enigmatic, much more complex and evolved selves are hatched, in secret...

And thus, though the vast majority of his complex visions gets to be most of the times transmuted in concepts and ideas, nothing stops them from also making triumph the esthetic principles of visual creation.
         And if the extraordinary largeness of Petru’s creation is so impressive, his originality and masterful technique are at every step adding delight and surprise, as one discover Petru’s sophisticated instruments of art performance...