Bitzan belongs both to Romania and to Europe, more than he presents himself. His post-modernist irony and the alternative techniques of collage, assemblage, painting, graphic work he uses render his work the capacity of universal language. Although he feels that Romania is too small country for artistic movements to be born and to get to maturity - "to saturate," as he puts it - the direct contacts with Western art gave him the right impulses to continue his personal artistic journey.

Anca Ionita

"In Review" Magazine Assistant Editor

"You can't live isolated in an explosion of information. I was very influenced by what was happening in the west. In Romania also, contemporary art has to be taken into account - Constantin Brancusi in particular. Brancusi had trained in the same way that we had, which is a sound background for any artist. from this point of view, I think that the art school in Bucharest is good. I don't think that Brancusi's type of work would have been possible without that training. Composition, structure and colour references have to be mastered. Otherwise, you're like an untrained violinist".

Ion Bitzan  in an interview with Sean McCrum at The Arts Council of Northern Ireland's Gallery, Belfast, June, 1985

"We are prisoners of the impossible" once Pablo Picasso said, and we can easily identify with this in a number of Bitzan's works, from where we get that gentle and tentacular vertigo, the sort of tenacious, immaterial fantasy, which makes narrow blue rivers vibrate like strings.

Dan Haulica

Honorary President of the International Association of Art Critics

Bitzan is undoubtedly a bibliophile, though one who loves the shape, the figure, the image of the book rather than its content. He is actually diffident towards the book viewed as a deposit of deceiving texts, praising the book as a material presence. Obviously, an artist who employed so many artistic means and expressions, changing the styles and ideologies, inclines to defy the text, more precisely its sense and significance viewed as an unequivocal message.

Erwin Kessler

Bitzan paints spaces of calm and strata of epochs. Representations of medieval books, calf-bound or between covers of unexpected material, lure us to reaches of mysterious thought and extravagant learning; we feel as awed and open to the richness of man's mind as we would among the manuscripts stored in a Gothic abbey.

Marin Sorescu

"What I can do is to adapt what is coming from outside to what I am doing. You can not be in only one life in so many places,"

 

Ion Bitzan in an interview with Anca Ionita - "In Review" Magazine Assistant Editor