In the works of Mircea But, concrete visual situations, pertaining to the calibration of perception and to the allusion of vacant stare, blend into the possibility of detecting aesthetic constructions, which, however, derive from functionalist plans.

What is deducted as architecturally concrete is blurred and reorganised in the decoupage of detail as a simple, raw, but elegant form of poetry. The role reversal between earth as a pedestal and sky as a vanishing point is a rhetorical subtlety that is deliberately contradicted by a second or a ninth look in the area of prohibited contact with the proximity of a room’s corner, the spatial shape that is the most unstable in meditation, solitude and detachment.

Nothing of what can be touched is natural in searching and nothing of what is still on the other side has the meaning of experiencing the unknown.

However, in the context of familiarity, the surfaces seem to breach the principle of distance, the textures seem to become hyper-tactile – both in the experience of roughness and in the appearance of smoothness –, the chromatic is treated as the subtlest refraction of geometrical improbability, and the shadow is the tacit emphasis that overthrows convention.

The gestures behind the lines on the canvas seem to measure the force of the s[ace or to tease a unification of the elements of pictorial syntax in order to blatantly contradict, as if in a mirror, the planeity with which modernism was attempting to kill itself.

In the act of engaging with (de)abstractisation, raw geometrism seems to be betrayed with emotion and charm, but also with the subtlety of sculpting a space in order to cloak an indecisive infidelity to painting.

Sometimes the painting seems to become part of a house’s wall, assimilating the memory of its rendering, wallpapers, decorating accidents, as well as its history of habitation.

In other situations, painting is handled as a case of archaeology in layers of matter that is dark or illuminated by vague discoveries that later collapse under other digs, that seem to be annotated.

However, the archaeological sites in every pictural space become the site of a mapping or of a reverse constellation seen from other worlds, which do not seem to remember much of our world. And that is precisely why the maps of these territories, located at the zenith or the nadir of other worlds, may have been, at some point, herbaria or blueprints of machines from the most approximate past, or else ideograms of a wasted language or the flags of empires that have become lost in space.