"The Journey, a search of the role of contemporary art in religious and spiritual life"
Malcolm Miles
A Usher publication in association with Redcliffe Press
April 1990
Malcolm Miles, professor of Cultural Theory in the School of Architecture, Design & Environment at the University of Plymouth, UK
“Stefan Ramniceanu re-invents the imagery of the Orthodox church through contemporary, abstracted “icons’’. As a Romanian under the oppression of the Ceaucescu regime he, like some other artists, turned to paintings of churches as a form of carefully coded dissent, but his work goes beyond the expedient. Like Horia Bernea, he reworked the image of the church banner, in encrustations of paint which turn the picture from description to object. Some of the layers of paint surface are scraped back, and the work takes on a damaged quality, accumulation and decay, adding and taking away, that movement across and between states of a transitional object.”