The artist
Painter, writer and cultural theorist. Born on 8 February 1952 in Baia de Aramă, Mehedinți, he lives and works in Suceava, Bucovina.
For Constantin Severin, painting and writing are parallel instruments of inquiry. Signs, figures and cultural memory pass between them: the image becomes a field of thought, while language takes on the density of an object.
“Art suspended between the real and the imaginary.”
He founded Archetypal Expressionism in 2000 and has developed the concept through exhibitions, essays and international dialogue.
Biography
Constantin Severin is the founder and promoter of Archetypal Expressionism, the concept he established on the contemporary art scene in 2000 and has developed ever since through paintings, essays and international dialogue.
Visual artist
He is a visual artist, a member of the Ottawa Art Association in Canada and the founder of the Archetypal Expressionism Group. His concepts and artworks have been published by major international art and literary magazines — Artdaily, World Literature Today, It’s Liquid, Levure littéraire, Empireuma, Contemporanul, Vatra, Arkitera, Glare Magazine, Cuadernos del Ateneo, Dance and Media Japan and Pro Saeculum among them — and he has served on the juries of prestigious international art contests.
In 2016 he completed the three-month course “The Power of Colour” at the KLC School of Design in London with a score of 95 out of 100. The in-depth study of colour, chromatic relationships and the psychology of colour gave him a new perspective on the way colour constructs not only an image, but a mood, a symbolic tension and an archetypal structure.
Writer and theorist
He is also a writer, a member of the Romanian Writers’ Union, a contributor and reviewer at World Literature Today, and a journalist who worked for Romanian publications as well as for the BBC and Radio Free Europe. He is the theorist of post-literature, a concept in the philosophy of culture first published in Trans magazine, Vienna, in 2003.
A graduate of the “Gheorghe Asachi” Technical University of Iași and, in 2015, of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, he has published more than 800 articles, essays and interviews on culture, art theory and criticism, as well as on other questions of Romanian and international interest.
Collections
His work is held in public collections — Bucovina Museum in Suceava, the museums of art in Piatra Neamț and Drobeta-Turnu Severin, and the National Brukenthal Museum in Sibiu — and in private collections in Romania, Germany, France, the United States, Finland, Norway, Canada, Switzerland, Ukraine, Italy and Great Britain.