Reviews

"The interiority of the face
Father Cristian does not live in the insecurity of artistic modeling, which
seeks originality at all costs, nor in the grey worlds of an arts imprisoned in
itself. The emotions offered to the beholder through images transcend the
frontiers of wonder, helping him to understand that we are, entirely – beyond
the times and even beyond the worlds that interpose between us – carriers of
signs transfigured by the light of Providence. His images invite contemplation.
Making his faces internally in detail not subject to immediate interpretation
and, all the more so coincidentally, he sees the leaps of art looking for itself,
forgetting the truth of things, like gross breakings, maintained by minds living
critically and ambiguously in relation to life, closed at length to mystery, and
sometimes, In spite of the evidence itself, the signs that God's generosity
sprinkles through the world. It is therefore impossible to evaluate his work
with hermeneutics for the sake of criticism. This kind of critical approach,
commonly referred to as "interpretation", meets with vanity, which has been
acknowledged as a failure to push things into nothing and which, in practice,
misses the essential. In the gallery of his portraits, you don 't come socializing
to admire aesthetically at the creative signs. Here you meet with the emotion
of contemplating the face of life in the faces of others. Looking at his work,
you stay imprisoned in the world, you admire the fecundal seasons of
Providence, and you spontaneously forget the words that reach at the corners,
the fall. The creations of Father Cristian puts you naturally in relation to Life.
They befriend meaning and dissolve your critical tendencies Watching them,
you realize that the peak is right in front, that looking at the details the mind
stumbles into them, that we steal fake smiles to raise pedestals to impossible
worlds, and that we look over the fence of others to signs that have nothing to
do with life. It is as if we are giving birth to gray autumns in hearts set in the
world to continually give God as spring. Every sign contained in the images
that compose the pictorial ensemble offered to the eye is the concrete trace –
tangible in the spiritual emotion that points to the heart – of the presence from
the infinite joy with which God created the world. Father Cristian recovers
the creative act and activates it by constantly re-signifying it. The freshness
of the child, manifested in the effervescence that crosses his artistic sensitivity,
confirms to me again, as confirmed by other people who pointed out my
existence, that God did not choose to incarnate in his creation in vain. Father
Cristian places in images, which I am not tired of looking at, looking at others,
timeless sequences of eternity that we all carry in faces. He gives in every
image, which he shapes by looking at his interiority, something from that face
that he wears. They all meet in their faces. Maybe that's why their faces and
looks are so intimate. I get the feeling that by giving them to us, he's already
met them.
Looking at these faces, I receive a gift of insight into what the world of healing
emotions looks like, offered by God through people. I have managed over
time to step through Father Cristian, even by post, the soul lines and to
understand that the images he offers come from the healing experience of the
spiritual emotions that feed his inner life. My mind has failed to identify them
– a sign of the mystery that endresses them – but it lives them fully without
naming them whenever I admire their creations. They prioritize the sense
anchored in God, constantly sending toward God. This journey, made through
the heart, gives me the certainty, as if it were necessary to confirm, that the
emotion offered is not born of the images that allow themselves to be seen.
The image is only what my eyes are able to see, making it superficial, in the
horizon of banality. What is offered to my eyes is already transfigured by the
grace shaped in the heart, the inner momentum that never ceases to move in
God. No matter how much the image of the image he creates may seem to be
embedded in the world, Father Cristian gives him something of the image of
God, passing him by and working him both artistically and spiritually from the
gift received, through the image palpating in God that he himself bears."

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"If the image given to others is first of all a look in oneself, ideally, the vocation
of an image is not to be admired, but to be contemplated, an invitation to
convert sight beyond the immediate. When you offer images for contemplation,
you are not faithful to the rendered image unless you offer the other as he
“sees” himself. What is amazing in Father Cristian's creations is the very fact
that the images offered are not “personal visions” of Father Cristian – we are
tempted to believe it, diminishing through inadequate criticism the spiritual
interior of an exceptional artistic act – but absolute views, as far as humanly
possible, the world within which everyone sees himself as he is. Generally, by
looking at others, you have a human tendency to see them through yourself in
contrast. Looking at others, Father Cristian surpasses this specific and limiting
contrariety of being cut off from the vocation of the one and tragically
individualized in her own view of the world. He sees them “by themselves,
” traveling in every face, not by himself. This is the sign of spontaneous
generosity, increasingly rare in artistic creation, which lives beyond criticism
and reshapes the living from the gifts placed by God in all corners of the
world and in every living being. You do not look at the peak, watching you,
but you look at the untouched height of the peak, entering into the
unfathomable mystery that binds you, through it, to the ascent. It is only in the
change of mind that this inner vision of the other is possible. In changing the
mind as a therapy of self-gaze, walking through everyone else. In this sense,
the works of Father Cristian are signs of remaining in the world, as a gift, and
of leaving the world as a vocation, by fixing the gaze of the other in an insight
that never ceases to examine the mind from the gaze of the face it offers to
contemplation. Father Cristian invites us to contemplate the face of God from
the created faces.
To call things by name, the Holy fathers used the word parrhesia, directly
confronting others with the truth of things. If in the polemics of parents with
the world of habits, the word captured the unalterable essence of life, the
images offered by Father Cristian are another form of parrhesia, direct speech,
through the faces of others, about the life of the world that dwells in them.
There is present in them a philocalic foretaste of the Living that crosses them,
a free rigor of constraints of the esthetic sense crossed and shaped by the Spirit,
in order to transform into the flow of life the will to find its meaning in the
temporal images of the world. Beyond interpretation and talent, there is active t
hroughout these esthetic attempts, the fragile will to aim the essential in the
very passage of the world. I do not cease to see it as another form of
contemplation. The talent of Father Cristian, recovered as the whole
consciousness of the gift received, places the viewer face to face with the
Living of Life, confronting each one with his own searches for meaning. As if,
caught in the horizon of a fragile balance of soul, we let ourselves be led to the
essential. Because no one can fail to notice that Father Cristian's lines are
searches of the essential, signs of the will to enter, through the image, into the
Life that does not end in eternity.
I would fall in an even more gray autumn, if I defined Father Cristian's art by
an inappropriate appeal to the terms with which art criticism unfortunately
manages to numb our interior, deconstructing through fireworks built by words
what only the heart can see. Looking at his portraits, I cannot help seeing,
aimed at each, the portrait of the interior that carries God. In fact, above all and
beyond, how can you carry God more faithfully in your heart than through
friendship, understood as an invisible bond, strengthened by fidelity to those
who enter your life? The portraits I admire are the image of the friendship that
connects Father Cristian to all the people left and gone from the world. This
friendship carries her heart that bears her Face. In the heart, I believe, the
relationship between God, man, and the world is concerned, and we cannot
bring this relationship to the surface of the world except through personal
work! Father Cristian has the gift of visually restoring this creative movement
of the heart. I think that is his gift! Gift over the gift!"