Voyeur 2013

Voyeur

A sample of Romanian export

The project reflects a critic attitude to the general prejudice that the society has it towards the Gipsy community. “Voyeur” means hidden watcher, represents the activity of guilty and secretly watching, spying, violating a private space or activity but it also means the lack of interference. It is a known reaction of society towards the Gipsies, the prejudice and the conviction of ruining the image of the country outside the borders as illegal immigrants. A room is completely covered with the traditional textile (like a wall paper) that Gipsies use for their clothes, full of strong colors. They are nomads so they take with them everything they have, the music, the colors. The room would be a paradox, a meeting between their permanent travel and the fix point, limited by walls, which nobody gets to see very often. The border of their space is usualy kept closed to the others but they also have no borders in their travel, any country, any space belongs to the Gipsies as long as they are there, with no time limits. Denying their membership to the society by prejudice and discriminating attitude, convicting the Gipsy community for ruining the image of Romania all over the world doesn’t solve the problem of their integration and acceptance but create new useless borders that deny the human rights and the humanity itself. Focusing on their negative contribution in the daily social life, the country that hosts them can easily forget the cultural potential they possess. Even the Gipsy community itself can forget, because of the struggle for surviving, the richness of their customs and traditions. The reality is denied, simplyfied and the borders were established between the “minority” and the others. The sound inside the installation is a mixture of traditional Gipsy music, daily normal sounds and discussions inside the Gipsy community.

X-border Bienniale, Konsthallen, Lulea, Sweden, 2013

Cosa mentale 2012

Cosa mentale

“Balasa: Cosmic Shadows” was a Visual Kontakt project in November 2012 at Laborator. Visual. Kontakt, Oradea, Romania. Sabin Balasa, the Romanian Painter Known for his communist propaganda paintings is a controversial figure in the Romanian art. “Cosa mentale” represents an ironic reinterpretation by extracting the characteristic blue of his paintings in a minimal way. It’s like extracting the only component unrelated to his compromise with the Communist regime before 1989.

Overrated prices even after The Revolution for his works made him even more controversial, the small dimensions of the works are ironical implying an “accessibility”, a cheap version so anybody can have “a piece” of his cosmic blue.

Pretender 2008-2012

Pretender

Woman is submissive to the cliché influence because and through fashion; she submits to social and esthetic demands through her looks and is, by nature, a sure target for any manipulation strategy. Despite the feminist movement, fashion is still preponderantly feminine. The clichés born from the marketing strategy that supports the entire fashion industry become valid and gain supporters because of their ability of constantly generating new clichés; they are able to reinvent themselves in a manipulating perpetuum mobile.

The feminine cliché proposed by fashion insinuates subconsciously; it alters behavior and influences the relation with society. In order to comply with social acceptance, a woman appropriates the cliché; she values it as reference and norm. In the case of artistic feminine ideals which later became clichés, a woman’s relation with them has also a profound poetic dimension.

Following the “game” of pretention in the contemporary socio-cultural context, from the two perspectives – artist and model – the project “Pretender” is the largest of its kind; it will consist of one thousand small art works conceived as an illogic story board, hallucinating through its apparent innocence. The actual focus is the contrast between imposture and identity, between disguise and reality, as well as between character and context. We restore feminine “clichés” without an actual disguise; we emphasize the artificiality and the process by which the image suppresses  reality through the placement of this feminine “prototypes” in an improper context – for example, a spy in a leather jacket at the seaside with a 70s traditional family.

We deliberately chose monochromy in order to “translate” photography into painting, and the small dimensions require the viewer to step closer (a reverse process from how we usually look at a painting, from the distance) like when looking at an intimate family photo.

Blind Date 2007-2008

Blind Date Blind Date

The entire human experience, every encounter with another individual, every situation in which we find ourselves is like a blind date: a contrast between expectations and reality, the adjustment or rejection of a new context.
The relation to the entire social context is seen as a hesitation to reach an opinion, like a “settled” date with the unknown, an imaginary, anticipated unknown.
When putting different situations in contrasting contexts, the radical result is a blind date of a character with him or her self.

The Outsider 2005-2006

The Outsider

The self-portraits suggest the existence of a glass wall between the viewer and the character. Both the viewer and the subject have an “outsider” status: the subject “gets” into the image through a filter and the viewer is allowed to see the image through a multiple filter: the painted image, the glass wall and the personal interpretation.

Playing with the double self-portrait creates another filter meant to maintain the conflict between the author and the works, and also to increase the tension by multiplying the same figure in different situations. The subject becomes object and simulates the self-detachment by this game of repetition.

Face to Face 2005-2007

Face to Face

The characters are replaced by personalized details. There is no face, there are no personal features, the expressive detail of a gesture replaces and becomes the subject. The human character is reduced to hands, passive and descriptive detail which has a relevant particularity.

Two stages of the same project are confronting each other as oposites: dynamic colorless gesture and colorful passive posture as symbols of anonymous global action and the individual passivism.