The artist Marian Zidaru: an exceptional religious symbolist

The visual artist Marian Zidaru was born in an unhappy century, in which the struggle between materialism and idealism was settled firmly in favor of the former, which managed first to become power in the state and then to exercise a despotic influence over man. In the communist state the artists had to choose: to become court flatterers of the power, promoting a decadent materialist art, or to unveil the ugly face of the world in which they lived, risking the prisons or the specter of the day when they would die of hunger. This alternative lasted for a while even after the fall of communism, in that troubled period of transition which seems never to end. To Marian Zidaru, however, God offered the chance to choose a third way, that of purification, giving him as a model a group of Orthodox Christians whose life was shaped after the Word of God, which, coming down from heaven at Pucioasa ever since the year 1955, was counseling them like children how to choose and how to keep the way, the truth and the life. Marian Zidaru did not waste this unique chance, but chose the resurrection in spirit. He was reborn himself a Christian after this model offered by God, in a world in which atheism and religious conformism had swallowed up, little by little, the spirit of the church and its people.

Marian Zidaru was not content to convert in mentality, but in his whole being. That is why his art registered a radical turn in religious symbolism. In a world contorted by fears, taught to speak about God in a whisper and to make the sign of the cross with the tongue, Marian Zidaru had the courage to give, through the art object, a visible face to the word of the Scripture which says that when people will be silent, the stones will cry out and will confess Christ, the Crucified and Risen One. (see Luke 19/40).

Marian Zidaru took a risk twice. First, he risked his peace, promoting an art with a religious message in a world soaked with the materialist-atheist doctrine. Then, he risked his credibility both among artists, critics and people of culture, and among his Orthodox co-religionists, translating in a vision of his own, through the material art object (stone, wood, metal), the ineffable of the Scripture. This act of courage stirred up some open oppositions which in time acquired an acute aggressiveness. Those who did not understand the Brancusian symbolism which Marian Zidaru strove to adapt to the biblical message accused him of religious infantilism and artistic heresy. His detractors resorted to all the cheap props of the defunct communist atheist propaganda: retrograde art, anti-Christian, anti-dogmatic, antisocial, narrow sectarianism, contempt for the Christian hermeneia, idolatry. How much, and what, did these artistically illiterate slanderers understand from the message of the art of Marian Zidaru?

For those who have eyes to see, however, the message of Marian Zidaru is as clear as can be. He strives to demonstrate to man that the unseen world can be perceived with the senses freed from passions, washed of sin. In his art, the wings translate the comfort of the Holy Spirit (see Exodus 25/20), and the countless eyes remind of the omnipresence of God (see Ezekiel 1/18). Man, however, has grown so used to the dull existence of a semi-basement, that if someone offered him wings for free to fly, he would probably refuse vehemently; instead, he carelessly shapes the evil spirits after his own image and likeness, through the exercise of free will. In this context, the artist cannot be blamed for capturing the mentality of his fellow men. In the Middle Ages, the mental prototype of carnal beauty (plump, even fat women, chubby babies) was transferred into artistic creation. The artists did not shy away from representing holy women dressed in few clothes, worn carelessly in order to emphasize the roundness of their forms, and the little angels as rosy babies, stark naked and bursting with health. The fault does not belong to them, but to the spirit of that time.

Today contemporary man has passed altogether from spirit into flesh. The world has remained poor and ugly. Those who call themselves „Christians“ have reduced their faith to sketching on the body some hurried and crooked crosses and to the occasional lighting of a handful of candles. The crooked cross has become, therefore, an ordinary component of everyday life, something inseparable from man. It carries with it, however, also a symbolic connotation: the cross is alive; it feels the present suffering of Christ for the sins of man and bends with pain. At the same time, it is abandoned; man has detached himself from it, not wanting any more to deny himself, to take up his cross and to follow Christ. And when Marian Zidaru reproduces with courage and perseverance this sad state of affairs, visible at every step, those indirectly targeted are inflamed with the inquisitorial spirit and launch into invectives that aim at annihilating the artist, thus regaining for themselves the sweet quiet of dogmatic self-satisfaction: «„The art of the Jerusalemites“ is full of symbols which have too little or even nothing in common with authentic Christian art... the public knows nothing about authentic representation and judges only by the criteria of an aesthetic deformed by lies; their works manage to impose themselves through the bizarre, and not through the message communicated» (quoted from the magazine „Catacombele Ortodoxiei“, July 1999, page 23).

In reality, these so-called „Jerusalemites“ are authentic Orthodox Christians, who respect the canons of the ancestral Orthodoxy and are organized in the community of the Church of the New Jerusalem in Pucioasa, the new Bethlehem, where the Word of God was born and is born.

As we have already said, the message of the art of Marian Zidaru is deciphered with ease wherever preconceptions and dogmatism are given up. Unfortunately, the blindness of the many is without cure, because it starts from the heart. For them, Marian Zidaru invents artistic licenses, translating into written language what they, artistically illiterate, cannot understand: word, horizon, water, sky, fire, earth. But, as was to be expected, the messages were received the wrong way round, not as an impotence of the viewer, but of the artist. With the painter Sorin Dumitrescu, for example, the envy of the guild hatches shamelessly and then bursts out in little articles at the foot of the page, marked with coarse, carnal accents, which unmask his exophthalmic inability to look at the objects in themselves and to distinguish the informal diaphanous which hides in the art of Marian Zidaru: «The plastic lollipops made of prolix materials... Zidaru’s objects cannot be looked at in themselves, adored unilaterally, aesthetically... „cool“ drawings... Zidaru’s objects and texts are one, and each taken separately are incongruent... I have called them sectarian... describes a sort of Marian Zidaru, hard of hearing and unable to articulate even a little word, but in whom the charisma is about to burst» (Sorin Dumitrescu, the newspaper „România liberă“, 1995).

Naturally, however, the honest critics did not shy away from operating with superlatives in their essays: «...at the present time, Marian Zidaru is the only complete artist that Romanian culture possesses... He symbolically re-invests the most authentic Christianity, in its Orthodox variant... Marian Zidaru presents not only an art that tends towards perfection, but also himself as a human model who, without being ascetic, tends towards perfection» (Erwin Kessler, the magazine „22“, 1995).

But the gravest confusion, a deliberate confusion this time, is between the artist Marian Zidaru and the „charismatic person“ Marian Zidaru, as his denigrators conceived it in their minds. Not being able to understand him as an artist, they attacked him as a man. His childlike sincerity and the joy of preaching the Word of God, both with the tools of the artist and by word of mouth in various occasional circumstances, were exploited against him, attributing to him ambitions he never had, so that afterwards they could contest them as uncanonical. Thus, Marian Zidaru was „anointed“ overnight by his slanderers as „founder“, „organizer“, „guide“ or „guru“ for the few Christians who remained authentic in the ancestral Orthodox living. On the contrary, it was precisely these who understood him as he was and received him among them and protected him and loved him as a younger brother. This approach of theirs, of tolerance and even of protection of modern art, was misinterpreted and understood the wrong way round by the defamers of Marian Zidaru, who stubbornly promoted him in their vision as an „innovator“ and „creator of a new sect“, in fact the sect of the Nazarene Who preached Himself as Word of God, and Who set on the Romanian land the New Jerusalem prophesied through the Scriptures.

Everything that Marian Zidaru created was used from then on not only against him, but also against the Christians who had adopted him as a brother. The envy of the devil collapsed over the Church, bringing darkness and hatred, the hunger of Moloch who devours his sons. The institution of the Church, instead of embracing the greatest miracle of all times, the Word of God, which flows like an unfailing river day and night, attributed it with an unpardonable serenity to... Marian Zidaru, accusing him at the same time of mystification. It then grew fierce in an unprecedented opposition, casting itself out of the arms of God and preferring the loneliness in the desert, a new Babylonian captivity, which the Jews too have been tasting for two thousand years, still waiting for the Messiah.

That is why, for those who still have not understood anything of what has happened and is happening around this artistic personality, a detailed, firm and definitive clarification is necessary.

1. Marian Zidaru was, is, and probably will remain a great artist, for whom the plastic art is an intimate existential manifestation, polished over many years of training, contemplation and work, from which he cannot, does not want to and does not even need to part. In this capacity he expresses himself freely, engaging his creation in his own name as a translator of his own experiences and visions, but also of those of his fellow men from the seen world about the unseen world. No one has the right (although some have done it abusively) to take his artistic interpretations and to transfer them onto the whole community of Christians to which Marian Zidaru belongs. No one has the right to interpret tendentiously the art of Marian Zidaru, giving it a symbolic nuance other than the strictly personal one, and then accusing him that he would propose a new religious style and a new mentality of Christian life. Orthodoxy is not legitimized through the singular creation of a visual artist, but through the community life in the church, in accordance with the Spirit of the Holy Scripture. That is why all the previous speculations which try to anathematize (using the invented phrase: „the sect of Marian Zidaru“) the irenic openness adopted by the Orthodox Christians of the Church of the New Jerusalem towards his art are struck by the nullity conferred on them by the obtuseness and ill intent of his denigrators. If it were necessary -but it is not!-, the Christians of the Church of the New Jerusalem could give up at any time all the artistic creation of Marian Zidaru (except for the Holy Crosses and the Holy Icons), but the Word of God come from heaven they will never give up.

2. Marian Zidaru is neither founder nor mentor of any Christian sect. He is an ordinary Orthodox Christian, assimilated into one of the communities of Orthodox Christians who live Orthodoxy authentically in the spirit of church: the Church of the New Jerusalem. Here he has no function, no rank, he cannot be called even „the first among equals“.

3. Marian Zidaru is not author or co-author of „The Word of God“, he is not even a dogmatic theoretician, for his communications on artistic-religious themes are few and occasional. The Word of God, this „river“ which floods the earth and the heaven, watering them so that the souls dried up of the love for God may sprout, does not belong to Marian Zidaru, nor even to any other man. It comes from heaven and is what it is and calls itself: the Word of God. Those, however, who hastily associated this work above nature with the zeal, the eloquence and the formative-educational possibilities of Marian Zidaru were deceived.

Did the priest Ioan Buga not notice, for example, that his own malicious speculations regarding the person of Marian Zidaru tend involuntarily towards the absolute superlative, which belongs only to God? In the vision of Ioan Buga, namely in its positive part, «...The genesis of the phenomenon of Pucioasa... is sensed to have been extremely Orthodox and profound... Marian Zidaru... remains a theologian almost without equal, in all of present-day Orthodoxy. He moves in Scripture in both its sides, with an ease and a familiarity of doctissimus angelicus... he has hidden himself definitively in Scripture and everything he does or speaks bears the unmistakable imprint of the biblical spirit... He can at any time continue an Isaiah, a Jeremiah above all, a Paul and even Christ, as regards the prophetic-eschatologist manner of expression... He dreams of a world of pure love, without sin...». Only about the art of Marian Zidaru does the priest Ioan Buga have an honest vision: «...-see his painting- the thinnest Byzantine line possible...» (quotations from the book „Golgotă și Parusie“ by the priest Ioan Buga, pages 27-28). Strange myopia in this priest, otherwise especially learned, to attribute to Marian Zidaru almost divine qualities, incompatible with the actual reality. Did he not know that on the theological plane Marian Zidaru is self-taught, having received from the schools of his time not even elementary theological training, let alone university training? And, then, is it not evident that the sublime intrinsic to the Word of God surpasses in persuasion all the philosophical creations existing at present, elaborated painfully by enlightened minds, by personalities known in life, who could, if it came to it (but to what purpose??) stitch together beautiful words into so-called „heavenly“ messages? Who could do it, tirelessly, for almost fifty years now? In no case Marian Zidaru, aged, now, forty-seven years.

The Word of God is not, therefore, conceived and spread by Marian Zidaru.

The Word of God was, is and will be the One Who can rightly say about Himself: I am Who I am.