Jacques Hérold’s return to Romania was never meant to happen…

Born Herold Blumer in 1910, in Piatra Neamț, he left the country at the age of twenty, breaking away from academic tradition and provincial constraints in order to join the vibrant avant-garde scene of interwar Paris. He would never return.

Body of the Unseen, presented by RUS Collection at PLAN4 (Bucharest), is not meant to be a classic retrospective, but rather a poetic reappearance. A return - not to origins, but to a form of confrontation.

Upon arriving in Paris, Hérold worked briefly alongside Brâncuși, from whom he absorbed a formal rigor charged with tension. He quickly joined the Surrealist circle, befriending  André Breton, Yves Tanguy, Victor Brauner - his compatriot, also born in Piatra Neamț - and exhibited within the major manifestations of the movement. A small drawing from 1931, included in the exhibition, captures this turning point: a work still figurative, delicate, already touched by the tremors of dream.

Hérold’s relationship with surrealism was less doctrinal and more intuitive. In Composition surréaliste (1942), forms seem to float, barely brushing against each other, in a dense and silent atmosphere. Later, his paintings will become increasingly abstract, yet will never lose their sensual charge. In Le miroir intérieur (1973), the shapes tremble like memories or mist on a window - these are not figures, but presences. In the large drawing Rêve de jeune fille (1972), it’s not about revealing a story, but about suspending a sensation, as if the paper had become the negative of a vanished dream.

At the entrance of the exhibition guards Femmoiselle (1947), a bronze sculpture that condenses the tensions and desires running through all of Hérold’s work. The word itself is an invention - a fusion of femme (woman) and oiselle (bird), and the figure it describes mirrors this image - hybrid, unsettling, feminine, and oracular. With a face torn in an almost anatomical motif, and a torso resting along the curve of the breasts, Femmoiselle is at once frontal and elusive, sensual and sealed. It is not merely a sculpture, but a sphinx at the gates of Thebes, marking a threshold, inviting visitors to cross into a more secret world.

Body of the Unseen brings together a rare collection of works from the RUS Collection, with the intention of marking the unique path of an artist who ceaselessly sought to give shape to the Invisible. Hérold’s art does not ask to be interpreted. It invites us to wander, alongside him, surrendering to the haunting revelations that pursued him relentlessly.

What returns is not the artist, but the echo of what he chose to leave unspoken.

- Dorian Dogaru