Painter Gheorghe Vânătoru
April 1975
Domăneşti - Satu Mare

Grigore Popescu’s paintings are a sweet ensemble of disciplined colourful greys, on a rhythm that matches the architecture. The colour predisposes to piety and the drawing harmoniously completes the whole painting.
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Rev. Dumitru Stăniloae
February 1990
Grigore Popescu’s religious paintings

Their tall and slim figures got me thinking of El Grecco’s paintings, but their faces identically thin reminded me of the features of the Orthodox saints’ ascetic life. But what characterizes these countenances is the unity of their ascetic features with the feelings expressed by them.
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Corina Popa
April 1990
Exhibition, House of Art

Grigore Popescu is among the few artists that are able to enliven the old rules of Byzantine painting in high quality aesthetic forms, involving sensitive and personal assimilation of Byzantine art and a deep faith in the ideas of Eastern Christianity as a particular love for the beauty of Byzantine figurative morphology....
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Nicolae Stoicescu
April 1990
Exhibition, House of Art

I didn’t come as an official, but as a true Christian and a historian. As I entered the hall and seeing the icons on display, I said to myself: if this incredibly talented painter had lived in the 16th century, he would have certainly been among the great masters of Humor, Voroneț or Sucevița, that’s how much he implanted and accommodated himself in the traditional style of Romanian painting. ...
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Doina Mândru
May 1990
1st YEAR/No.9, May 1990, ALTERNATIVE, 5th page

As a great connoisseur of technique, the painter obtains in his frescoes a certain transparency, velvetiness and freshness in the colours that individualizes him. The compositions, rich in characters, elaborated after Byzantine references, evince an exquisite sense of balance, a vision that firmly governs the entire ensemble. It gets noticed that important are the care for the iconographic suitability of the theme and the profound sensation which it inspires....
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Helmuth Wanner
February 1993
MITTELBAYERISCHE ZEITUNG, Regensburger Stadt-Umschau, 12th page

Icon painter Grigore Popescu opens a window to eternity. (...) If icons are windows to eternity, then Grigore Popescu, (…) is one of the best window painter in Romania. (…) In the Orthodox faith icons are a living thing.
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Acad. Răzvan Theodorescu
March 2004
Thursday, 18th of March, 2004, CURIERUL NAŢIONAL, 8th page

The most beautiful assembly of modern religious painting that I know in the entire Eastern Europe is organized at Borzeşti. Long ago I have said that Grigore Popescu is the most gifted-blessed artist (in this field of work), but I couldn’t have imagined that he would accomplish what he did. ...
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Prof. Dr. Ecaterina Buculei
January 2008
Albumul, FRESCĂ ŞI ISTORIE BORZEŞTI (2008)

A church and icon painter, Grigore Popescu creates with means of his own a manner of painting which, although follows the Byzantine tradition, is strongly marked by originality. Sober, precise, picturesque, full of poetry and elegance, his style overcomes the classic formulas, being inscribed in a fascinating pictorial form. His spirit transcends substance with a vivid joy which the artist himself feels and confers to his painting making use of...
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Acad. Răzvan Theodorescu
September 2008
Monday, 1st of September, 2008, Ziarul LUMINA, 9th page

Do not forget that we have Grigore Popescu, the most important painter of European Orthodoxy. And he has been used at Lainici, at Râmeţi. I, as a minister, together with the late patriarch, have chosen him to paint Stephen the Great’s Borzeşti, where he has created a masterpiece.
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Prof. Dr. Ecaterina Buculei
January 2009
NÜRNBERG frescă şi istorie Album (2009)

Inventive and cultivated spirit, he beyond the known limits of medieval iconography creating new themes like the “Tree of Christian unity” in the narthex, a very appropriate scene for the Nuremberg Orthodox Church’s environment. (...) (...)Bright and precious, it (the painting) is modelled in vivid colours, delicately transparent and colourful whites, where the strong accents of green and red play a special role, bearing the spontaneous and secure stroke...
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Prof. Univ. Mihail Diaconescu
January 2010
Albumul, LAINICI, Capodoperă a artei româneşti şi europene

Grigore Popescu-Muscel’s paintings encourages us to think about human condition as it is, about man’s spiritual vocation, but also the relationship between cult and culture based on the fulfilment and deification of humanity in each person. We admire the masterpiece-frescoes found on Lainici Cathedral’s porch and we perceive a sublime work of art in its unique details and in its religious dimension. It is a painting that catalyses...
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His Eminence Dr. Irineu Popa
January 2010
Albumul LAINICI, Capodoperă a artei româneşti şi europene

Anyone who has read this book-album has in front of him an unrivalled divine-human view, where, as at a mystical table, one does not know what to appreciate more: the mystery, the composition, or subtle explanation of those depicted. Without a doubt, nothing escapes not being thoroughly studied in this paradisiacal garden of Master Grigore Popescu. ( ... ) Through colour and light we are being shown that the Holy...
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Narcis Zărnescu
January 2011
6th YEAR, No. 40, 2011, CRONICA FUNDAŢIILOR, 11th page

On the Divine Comedy from Lainici. (...)Reviewing again-and-again Grigore Popescu-Muscel's frescoes from Lainici, this time with Mihail Diaconescu's Hermeneutics by my side, the thought that perhaps the only painter who imagistically could restore the cosmic vision and unrepeatable experience circumscribed by the Divine Comedy is none other than Grigore Popescu-Muscel just flashed me. As George Coşbuc managed to incarnate in Romanian words the Dantesque Comedy, Grigore Popescu-Muscel could, in...
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Art Historian, Doina Mândru
April 2011
Monday, 18th of April, 2011, Ziarul LUMINA, 12th page

In his iconography Grigore Popescu-Muscel praises the light that he loved so much. (...) It is the light which St. Dionysius the Areopagite said is part of the essence of things because it is the divine light which bathes all creation and has the quality to link created things together. (...) We can find a liturgy of light across the work of Grigore Popescu. His paintings confess about light and...
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Prof. Mihail Diaconescu
April 2011
Monday, 18th of April, 2011, Ziarul LUMINA, 12th page

He made a long series of artistic masterpieces, and this must be said clearly and with joy. We are in debt to praise the artists who know how to interpret through their works the Romanian soul, a wonderful soul, because we can speak of a Romanian spiritual beauty owed to the Orthodox benefactor for about 2,000 years. In this time values have been selected here so that they can recommend...
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Lecturer-Assistant Ligia VLAD
June 2011
Opinia naţională, 4th page

(...) Lainici. Masterpiece of the Romanian and European art. We are contemplating on the colour images of masterpieces made by Grigore Popescu-Muscel, printed on coated paper and we discover the creation of one of the most brilliant contemporary muralist painters in the history of modern Romanian culture. A very special combination of tradition and innovation, experience and culture, dogmatic rigour and imaginative splendour, confessional poetry and compositional rigour, expressive force...
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Rev. Prof. Dr. Gheorghe Drăgulin
June 2011
Ziarul LUMINA

Masterpiece of Romanian and European art: Lainici, gallery of holiness and ode to Hesychasm (...)Grigore Popescu-Muscel’s talent as a spiritual painter is based not only on personal grace, not only on professionalism, on the processing of precursors’ work, but on knowing and living the Scriptures and also the Orthodox spiritual tradition. (...) One element of his talent, but also of the painter’s theological erudition, is the execution, on same...
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His Eminence Serafim Joantă
January 2012
Interview by Mihaela Crăciun

His Eminence Serafim Joantă, Metropolitan of Romanian Orthodox Metropolitan See for Germany, Central and Northern Europe (...) I wanted very much the painting for this cathedral to be made by the best Romanian painter who is Grigore Popescu, Professor Grigore Popescu. (...) In terms of the iconographic programme, I found in Professor Grigore Popescu a man of great understanding. Because we find ourselves in the West, because the church has...
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Art Historian, Doina Mândru
February 2012
Ziarul LUMINA

Enlightened Portraits: A painter for the eternity of fresco Supremely demanding with his work, the artist is also a rare iconographer, a master of subtlety and of theological depth. The great compositional strength and theological depth of his fresco proved itself in the paintings he executed at the Church “St. George New” in Bucharest, in the altar, in the altar’s niches and in the nave’s tower. He has shown what...
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