The cultural patrimony of the Romanian Academy enriches today with two monumental works: the Ivory Tower and the Babel Tower, symbols of the eternal egos and human bravery, works that are posted in the headquarters of the institution, on the occasion of the generous donation. The gesture of the two creators, Florin Ciubotaru and Henry Mavrodin, honors us, renewing the hope in a better world, reconciled towards a noble communion among fellows. With great appreciation, the Romanian Academy assumes the preservation and guarding of the works that become part of our cultural biography.
Acad. Marius Sale
Vice-president of the Romanian Academy
The cultural project the Towers subscribes to the sphere of ideality from the perspective of the entirety, but also from that of its constitutive parts. The apparently contradictory senses of the symbols of the Ivory Tower and the Babel Tower: the purity of the withdrawal of the superior spirit, and the aspiration towards exhaustive knowledge reunite in the works that the artists Florin Ciubotaru and Henry Mavrodin donate to the Romanian Academy. The painters Ciubotaru and Mavrodin are two personalities that have marked the Romanian and European artistic ambient through their creation. I had the privilege of seeing them in the studio parlors of the University of Arts. For me, they were both ideal teachers, and for my professional and human becoming, they represented two coordinates, as diverse, as coherent, as two parallel lines seen in perspective, that intersect somewhere, thanks to an abstract optical convention: from Florin Ciubotaru I’ve learned that painting and the artistic act in general is indissolubly related to the ludic spirit (in the deep and serious sense), and from Henry Mavrodin, I’ve learned that the native brutality of colors, appeased only by the geometric rationality of the forms, sometimes can coincide with a work of art. For me, Florin Ciubotaru and Henry Mavrodin are two human profiles similar to the expressivity of the two towers. The ideality of the themes chosen fuse with the ideality of the gesture of donation to the Romanian Academy and are perfectly coherent to the profile of the two lives dedicated to the same ideal. I would also like to underline the special importance of the presence of Mrs. Anca Vlad, who managed to transform the monuments from an ideal fact into a real fact. I am very honored by the coordination of this cultural project, where the gesture of the two artists is doubled by the elegance of its reception by the Romanian Academy, an institution that stands for the ideality emblem under its various forms of manifestations, cultural and scientific.
Ileana Stanculescu
project coordinator
I have always loved arts. I have visited many museums and have seen many collections of the world. But before the masterpiece, my mind flew again and again to the loftiness and spirituality of the Romanian art. I have chosen this project because it echoed an older aspiration of mine: that I have, although I’m not a creator, but a humble sponsor, a mark on our country’s land. And nothing can be more inspiring than the objects of our great artists: Florin Ciubotaru and Henry Mavrodin.
Anca Vlad
President of FILDAS
These lines, undoubtedly, fill in an abusive way the place which is usually reserved to the platitudes which explain the miracle of creation for the purposes of applauses; an effort, otherwise futile and energy-wasting. In fact, I do not substitute myself to the specialist, but I simply celebrate, the timeframe in which we arrived together with Ciubo up to this point, to be able to make a sign. I remember him watching the sky quietly, sometime, long time ago, before we embarked voluntarily for Cythera, a time when the wind seemed favorable. My colleague, Florin Ciubotaru, the same as the word of noble essence, is beautifully getting old, while the marks of time exalt in him the same look with which he continues to see everything that the others miss, finding as natural something that many of us look for a lifetime. He likes a lot to live and he enjoys every light of every day, the same way when he confuses it with his palette; now he can more, deluged by the drama of life. He was a sinner too, because otherwise he would have never had the sacred privilege of forgiveness, the unique means that gets us closer to God. This is why the wind is more favorable to his sails. This is how discreetly, together, we still celebrate before people, the heart beats, a mitigating circumstance for the justification of the refusal of great words.
Henry Mavrodin
I do not dare to claim that I know Mao deeply, I would fall into the sin of approximations, of equivalences, of dissections that would cast away the true substance. All the guilt can be traced in the beginning, when naïve and sentimental, through juicy actions, we convened by unwritten rules for a long communication, and we shortly became collectors of absurd events, surrounded by a humor of tantalizing fragrance. Maybe this made it possible for us to bear each other a lifetime. When you are endowed and wise like Mao, you cannot stay aside. From his youth, having a good sense of orientation, Mao drew for himself a project of life and profession. Being part of a hostile background, he refused the verbal mechanics of promises, of false benefactors, deciding bravely and chancefully to compose a personal biography. The spontaneous accents, the unpredictable, the eccentricity adapted to his nature; he expressed them all with measure and consistency. His images reveal much science, and are so stable and balanced that you cannot change anything.
Florin Ciubotaru
Taken from biblacad.ro
