A history of Occidental painting until the 19th century can be read as a road of seeking and achieving image definition, which means not only optical precision but also pictorial reproduction in the most naturalistic way.

The pictorial revolution launched by Giotto; the Renaissance contribution of linear perspective completed theoretically by Brunelleschi and Alberti; chromatic perspective, defined almost poetically by Leonardo da Vinci; the dark rooms used by Dürer; the theatricality of Caravaggio’s paintings, where the “light spots” describe a reality close to the limits of the tangible; right up to the sophisticated pictorial methodology set forth in Academicism – all of them aspired to identify painting with the optical image of reality, with forms as perfect and as close to the original as possible.
Moreover – something that was noted only after photography entered the game as a terminal point of this evolution – the intervention in the pictorial image aimed to generalize the clarity of the full visual field (with all elements equally clear), though photography demonstrated practically the different degrees of clarity depending on the focus of the optical system and of the human eye.
This road converges with the history of Occidental thinking, inclined to conceptualize and to project a quantifiable reference system onto the world, as precise in its coordinates as is concretized with major significance for each of us today in the legislation, standards, prescriptions and recommendations generated by the conceptual macro-system of the European Union.

In contrast with this constant Cartesian evolution, Robert Bosisio’s recent painting turns our sights – much too acquainted with appreciating the clarity of increasingly sophisticated TV screens, computers, I-pods or phones – to the areas where clarity cannot be an aspiration as its opposite represents a questioning symptom capable of becoming a subject of his paintings.

His own device of “metabolism” of the painting practiced from the beginning of the last decade – “maximum sharpness” referring to geometrical construction and maximum softness of the pictorial element referring to the color elaboration – has increasingly subsumed geometry for the benefit of pictorial softness and undefined material. The interiors he used to paint in the mid-1990s, strikingly geometrical and with well-defined inventories evoking pre-modern Dutch painting, have in the later series been given blurred lines and chromatically expressed sensations rather than the frames familiar up to now.

This passage to the undefined calls up the always equivocal sensory aspect, and here the tandem of pain-pleasure can form a convincing example. However, I believe the focus is instead turning from the exterior to a more introspective view, translating the theme of “indoors,” which remains firm from the standpoint of linguistic expression, to the evocation of the opposite side, from the content’s perspective. Beyond its chromatic display, his painting can become the source of some questions related to the fragility of Cartesian certitudes and the questionable character of semblances.

For this painting with its fecund background optics and with its sensitive references to the inner, introverted reality, the baroque exhibition areas of the Art Museum of Cluj-Napoca, with their intricate gilded woodwork and windows in geometric harmony with the space, can form an optimal setting to contrast with Robert Bosisio’s new creative sensibility, helping the public to perceive the special qualities of this art all the more keenly.