Steven Heller – “Arts Magazine”, Summer 1984

Best known for his drawings, cartoons and collages in The New York Times, Time magazine, The New Yorker and other..."

Romanian born and a spiritual New Yorker, Mihaesco, best known for his drawings, cartoons and collages in The New York Times, Time magazine, The New Yorker and other major periodicals, is an exponent of his homeland’s innate absurdist sensitivity and Dada sensibility, as well as a proponent of a classical European mode of satirical illustration. Multilingual in the literal and metaphoric senses, he is conversant in the language of Dadaism, Surrealism and Symbolism, applying all to his imaginative lexicon of images and ideas. Mihaesco exemplifies a form called conceptual illustration, whereby the artist is not slave to a text. Rather, by interpreting and transforming the author’s reportage or commentary into personal metaphor and symbol, and by reacting to the essence of an article, a supplementary, thought-provoking image is created, which when successful offers another level of understanding. These are sometimes lyrical and other times acerbic; sometimes they are symbolic distillations and other times narrative continuities. But rarely are they literal in the traditional sense.