Lighter Than Air

A fascination with hands and the female body, a kind of natural history of sultry affairs with high heels and Rococo sugars, an insolent funny erotic weightless “expose” of just what it is that we’re missing: Akhenaton riding a carousel horse, facing skeleton face, gardens with bushes of blue tuna, a bird man sings, the pleasure of wearing red gloves is contagious, a poignant tribute to “The Lunatic,” a popular Yiddish play from another era that premiered up the street. …”Forbidden Windmills,” “Asymmetrical Shoe Master,”  “Mystical Séances in the Circus”…  Valery Oisteanu’s world of collage is porous, generative, iterative, erotic…  He said it best: Lighter than Air…

      Allan Graubard ( surrealist poet and publisher)

At the hand of the poet Valery Oisteanu we find a world of event and happenstance worthy of our attention. A catalog of all that happens. Art (the hardest calling) is not for the faint of heart. Or for the heartless. But for the person alive lusting to be heard. Collage is the hymn of the modern era from Braque and company to Schwitters and Hannah Hoch to Dizzy Gillespie to Stockhausen to Fluxus to DJ Kool Herc. Valery Oisteanu in his book Moons of Venus says:

My heart

         Shines like a haunted star

These works  are that star

Haunted with the wreck of history

Not a mirror on the world but the poet’s hammer with which to shape it

      Fletcher Coop (poet/painter)

Valery Oisteanu’s collages are alchemical mirrors in which oneiric elements are steeped in the most delirious eroticism imaginable. Breathless as lightning, these collages are raw, uncompromising, and subversive. They summon you into a trance state in which the unexpected always triumphs over the mundane.

      Bill Wolak (poet/collagist)