The anthropomorphic character of the chimeras is not a constant element. Sometimes, the head is just an excrescence, like in another sculpture, where the creature is organically bound to its pedestal by a sort of umbilical cord which inserts into its abdomen. Paciurea pursued his reflexion on the link between figure and pedestal in other sculptures. He even inverted the hierarchies, like in this small chimera, whose face is very vaguely humanlike: a sort of rough brick, of an ancient appearance gives birth to the chimera. It seems to emerge from this mass in which its paws are stuck.
Even if the artist’s statements on his art are rare, we know that he clearly stood up for sculpture, in the ancient debate on the rivalry between sculpture and painting: ‘Sculpture is the most plastic of all arts, being the most tangible and the closest to reality, unlike painting, that uses colour to create this illusion.’ ‘Closest to reality’ doesn’t necessarily mean for Paciurea that the sculpture must render real objects or beings, because ‘this art aims to realise in a raw material […] a flower, a leaf, animals, human beings or models without being.’ These ‘models without being’ probably evoke his strange chimeras.
Professor of the most important generation of Romanian sculptors, Paciurea didn’t durably influence them – with the exception of Horia Boamba (1890-1923). Far too intimate to be transmitted, Paciurea’s art remains unique and untypical in the Romanian context. The only student receptive to the chimeras’ fascination was not a sculptor, but a painter: Victor Brauner (1903-1966). Indeed, Brauner was one of Paciurea’s students in 1922, at the Fine Arts School in Bucharest. Like many Surrealists, Brauner executed a series of chimeras in the 1930s. But Paciurea’s chimeras represent more than a series. They are the climax of his entire work, of his spiritual and aesthetic quest.