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BY COSMIN NASUI

Breakthrough ofEastern Realism

In SLAG’s group exhibition of 11 Romanian artists, Against All Odds, the viewer encounters an important face of new figurative art from the New Europe of the east. The artists are from different cities and art schools in Romania and belong to two age groups, but they share a context: they are of the generations after the Romanian Revolution, a series of increasingly violent riots and fighting in late December 1989 that abruptly overthrew the Communist regime of Nicolae Ceauşescu.With respect to the styles of the featured artists, for the past four decades, social realism has been the reigning school of visual art in Romania. As formulated in of-ficial art theory, the goal of social realism was to approach the representation of a subject without using an imposed style of expression; observing a subject at vari-ous levels would lead to an appropriate expression. The artists in Against All Odds have transformed this esthetic, zeroing in on one state of reality or portraying its disparate fragments. In certain works, the details of that reality, dimly remembered and separated from its original context, evoke a radical change of perception. In other pieces, by simply presenting something as it is, the artists create harsh and provocative observations.

Social Pop Art

A self-styled “people’s artist,” George Anghelescu bridges the gaps between urban social art and social pop art. His works combine classical techniques of painting, en-graving, and drawing with collage, stencils, and graffiti in an ironic way. Anghelescu’s experiments in realism create a form of protest used as a critical tool in viewing a consumer society.

Unconscious Projection of Feeling

Irina Broboana paints a universe of battered dolls. They assume a double symbol-ism: the substitute for the traumatized child, and for the intimate object the child uses to share her thoughts or project her frustrations. Thus, the doll becomes for the observer the link between the personal universe of the child and the external world.

Reality Show

The character of Simona Sensual is a Romanian consumer mass-media creation who has a scandalous tabloid life on the covers of the morning newspapers. Her vain, superficial existence is conveniently wrapped for public consumption. In the paintings of Suzana Dan, Simona Sensual is lives her second, eternal life above the fluffy clouds in a sky framed with pinkish roses.

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“AGAINST ALL ODDS”

Published by SLAG GALLERYon the occasion of the exhibition

Published with the support of

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Luxury Animal Beauty

A mélange of fragments of reality set in a grand ballroom adorned with crystal chan-deliers, lush curtains, and silk brocade, is the focus in the paintings of Gheorghe Fikl. The baroque atmosphere creates symbolic and dream images of luxe. A sense of political surrealism arises through Fikl’s dark tones and powerful but out-of-place animals.

Fashion Victims

Mihai Florea, in his project Buckle-up, paints portraits of his subjects from the waist down, emphasizing the buckle design of each of their belts. Wryly, Florea makes each buckle an extension of their personalities, starting a dialogue between the buckle and its possessor. Besides being a fundamental sartorial accessory, in the process the buckle gains a new dimension and becomes part of the individuality of the wearer through the contextual message that it carries.

Poetry of Urban Reality

Artificial urban landscapes are an aspect of development that utterly altered the face of nature. In her paintings, Ioana Gorzo isolates elements of the urban common-place with a poetic simplicity that rises above casual observation. Her paintings—of pedestrian views of telephone poles and their webs of cables—craft an image of the Romanian post-revolution landscape. An intricate lattice of communication wires forms an oppressive mesh that blocks the sky. Viewed as metaphor, these sub-jects parallel the chaos that in other aspects of Romanian life create so many daily struggles and sagas.

Appetite for Reality

Dumitru Gorzo always finds a biting way to tackle issues. His work, always exciting and uncompromising, makes him one of the most interesting artists from Eastern Europe today. Truth May Lie leads the viewer enticingly toward the feeling of belong-ing to a specific milieu, yet implicitly propels us into the universal; an intentional ambiguity offers the viewer the opportunity to participate in the making of the story. On the Road filters memories through a mesh of pastels, exuding that singular after-noon-light that illuminates our journey through the days; sheer poetry, the painting invites us to hop in and continue “on the road” of life’s discoveries.

Shapes of Fear

Aneli Munteanu draws perceptions of a different kind of fear. The bed is the land where there is a connection between the waking world and that of dreams; bed sheets take the shape of psychic crises and agonizing states of mind. The body awakens, but parts of the spirit remain to inhabit the shapes of the sheets. The graphite drawings become portraits, drained of blood, devoid of flesh.

Replicas of Reality

Genetics is the latest series of sculptures by Bogdan Rata. Based in a “forgotten future”, his work reproduces “replicas of reality” reminiscent of the virtual world in the film Blade Runner. Rata multiplies human parts (fingers, ears, and so on) and com-bines them into new life forms. The newborn creatures seem to result from strange experiments with the human body in an esthetics lab. Rata’s works forge a contex-tual change of the anatomic detail through its obsessive multiplication. The materials used, and the resulting industrial look, question the assault on individual personality in a climate of commercial branding uniformity. The concept of “hand-foot” and the “unsuccessful blessing” symbol strengthens the idea behind the work, delicately propelling it into the realm of grotesque; the torso also evokes a twist of reality, the socially provocative themes of sexual identity and the hermaphrodite.

Hidden Reality

The paintings of Mircea Suciu present a special species of evocative reality, atmo-spherically transforming simple images against empty backgrounds. His composi-tions are unusual witty and cleverly surprising, using images from U.S. advertising of the 1940s and 1950s. At a formal level, his technique uses both realism and abstraction: realism informs the layer where the characters’ shapes and shadows are simply dropped onto emptiness; Suciu redefines abstraction as an almost ori-ental design, which is more meaningful in this context. At first look, the emptiness of the background suggests the anxiety and uneasy fear at the edge of a perceptual eternity: there, where reality echoes. Mircea leaves the background empty, inviting the viewer’s eye to embark into a journey of imagination. Suciu calls this mechanism “the boomerang effect”: sharing art that comes back charged with a myriad of new senses.

Freedom: The Ultimate Reality of the Poor

Prince and pauper, both together in the same character is the inspirational project Kings by Roman Tolici. Using realism as an inverted binocular, Tolici makes a sym-bolic change that is drastic in scale: like a dispossessed royal family, these elegantly painted portraits have an immediate humor to them, as well as a certain poignancy to the subjects destitution. Tolici’s painted discourse is about an absurd facet of hu-man condition. The participants, placed at two opposite poles of the social scale, find their common denominator in a bejeweled crown whose importance is solely contextual. Crowning the head of the destitute is as futile and ridiculous as crowning the head of the despot.

Cosmin Nasui is an art critic and contributing editor of Romania Libera & Observator Cultural magazine. He lives and works in Bucharest and is currently involved in a project studying the role of the erotic in modern and contemporary Romanian art.

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The Trip, 2008oil on two canvases21.5 x 27.5 inches each

The New Old Ways, 2008acrylic on canvas, 35.5 x 27.5 in

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Simulation I, 2007painting (mixed technique)35.5 x 47.25 in

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Simulation III, 2007painting (mixed technique)35.5 x 47.25 in

Simulation II, 2007painting (mixed technique)35.5 x 47.25 in

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We All Have Days that WeEnvy Simona Sensual, 2008acrylic on canvas, 10 x 10 in

Criticism of SimonaSensual’s Evolution, 2008acrylic on canvas, 8 x 10 in (oval)

Simona Sensual Got Boredof Her Demeanor, 2008acrylic on canvas, 8 x 10 in (oval)

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Simona Sensual Gets Bored of Staying Homeand Tries to Broaden Her Horizon, 2008acrylic on canvas, 9 x 12 in

Simona Sensual is Open, 2008acrylic and phosphorescentpaint on canvas, 9 x 12 in

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Bullterrier with Wings, 2008oil on canvas, 31.5 x 15.75 in

Bullterrier with Chandelier, 2008oil on canvas, 15.75 x 15.75 in

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On the Edge, 2008oil on canvas, 31.5 x 39.5 in

Pimp My Bee, 2008oil on canvas, 39.5 x 47.25 in

Teddy vs. Robot, 2008oil on canvas, 39.5 x 47.25 in

Suck My Rooster, 2008oil on canvas, 39.5 x 47.25 in

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Days of Our Lives I, 2008acrylic on canvas, 20 x 27.5 in

Untitled, 2008acrylic on newspaper15.75 x 22.25 in

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Days of Our Lives II, 2008acrylic on canvas, 22 x 28 inUntitled, 2008

acrylic on newspaper15.75 x 22.25 in

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On the Road, 2008oil on canvas, 26 x 48 in

Truth May Lie, 2008oil on canvas, 67 x 36 in

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M. & T., 2008pencil on paper, 20 x 14 inA

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pencil on paper, 20 x 14 in

R. & One of His Temporary Guests, 2008pencil on paper, 79 x 55 in

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A., 2008pencil on paper, 20 x 14 in

S., 2008pencil on paper, 20 x 14 in

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Ecce Homo (foot hand), 2008poliuretanic resin, 8.5 x 4.5 x 4.5 in

Ecce Homo, 2008poliuretanic resin8.5 x 4.5 x 4.5 in

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Torso, 2008poliuretanic resin26.75 x 11.75 x 7.5 in

Punck, 2008poliuretanic resin11 x 8.5 x 10 in

Ear, 2008poliuretanic resin 2.5 x 1.5 x 1 in

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Sleep of Reason, 2008oil on canvas, 39.5 x 43.5 in

Study of Pioneers, 2008oil on canvas, 39.5 x 27.5 in

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Crown 3, 2007watercolor on paper25 x 19.5 in

Crown 5, 2007watercolor on paper25 x 19.5 in

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Crown 4, 2007watercolor on paper, 25 x 19.5 in

OPPOSITE PAGE

Crown 2, 2007watercolor on paper

19.5 x 25 in

Crown 1, 2007watercolor on paper

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