Romania: Snapshot Romania

The Hunt (2013) by Aitch (Heliana ROTARIU)

I wanted to open this foreword with praise for the untouched canvas, in the belief that, all along the world tour undertaken by the Imago Mundi collection, it has already become a recognizable format, able to offer every artist an unprecedented and equal 120 sq cm very visible catwalk, on which they can apply the ‘square root’ or the ‘litmus test’ of their own creativity. And if the entrance token in New York – a point of reference for me and the city of my cultural background – launches a vitalizing incitement ‘to do it’ on a large scale: “if you make it in New York, you can make it anywhere”, with less emphasis and observing the proportions of “field & size”, I believe that we could launch a similarly challenging invitation: “if you manage to express yourself on a 10 x 12 surface, then you can deal with any other format”.

Untitled (2013) by Andrei Vlad TOADER

One more consideration regarding the front - rear of the canvas. During my visits in the artists’ studios, in order to recover the disseminated canvases, the net contour of the 10 x 12 artwork, now painted and hung on the center of the wall, often appeared in front of my eyes like a small and precious totem, positioned in the right light and of equal dignity alongside other works of far larger dimensions. Beyond the surprise of discovering the valuable object, the ‘hidden side’ or the ‘rear entrance’ of the canvas soon ended up intriguing me as much as the painted front. And so I have taken a beneficial step forward in questioning the way in which an artist commonly relates to the ‘canonical and cadastral’ surface of the artwork, as well as to the market value - often measured in square meters – by means of which both gallery owners and art collectors often evaluate and eventually stifle the artistic breath and the visual impact of the artist’s work.

The Dream Is About to End (2013) by Călin LUCACI

The full immersion in the artists’ studios allowed me to build up a comparison among the three systems, contiguous or integrated, which support the creation and the distribution of artworks in today’s Romania. And I am referring here firstly to the studios themselves, which, in all their diversity and – sometimes – anomalies, deserve a special photo-documentary approach. So the visual impact remains very unpredictable, from the precariousness suggested by the lack of maintenance, to the unique imprinting of the communist architecture, and to the progressive and unexpected creative solutions found by the artists, who show great proof of mastery even when it comes “to patching” their working spaces.

The Cruel Fairy Tale, Chapter 3: The Virtual World (2013) by Laura COVACI

In this neo-realist screenplay, the Plastic Artists’ Union (Uniunea Artistilor Plastici – UAP in Romanian) plays the lion’s part. This sort of Metro Goldwyn Mayer of Romania has a significant estate of buildings in the major Romanian cities, inherited from the communist period and consisting in a sort of ‘Potemkin fleet’ of tenement-like buildings, ‘agglomerates of creation’ and former industrial spaces of an architecturally devastating rigor mortis. All of these spaces are made available to the UAP’s members at affordable prices. In this real estate context, UAP has the privilege to manage a variety of art galleries without commercial purposes, ensuring a constant flow of solo and group exhibitions, in contrast to the objective difficulties faced by the private galleries who are forced to deal with the lack of a consolidated market of collectors in Romania.

Untitled (2013) by Irina HORSIA

Strengthened by these prerogatives, the UAP remains the main player in the field of Romanian contemporary art, providing the “sustainability” of the whole art system in the country – and little matters, in the end, if this stabilization has occurred on an ‘almost state-supported and seemingly private’ model. On the other hand – and it is good to remember here – even the well lighted, wide and comfortable space of the Romanian Museum of Contemporary Art occupies one of the many corners of the ‘mausoleum-mortuary’ of Ceausist Communism: Casa Poporului, so desired by the Ceausescu couple, which competes, for gigantism, with the Pentagon.

Vio & The Stars (2013) by Lea RASOVSZKY

In its private version, the UAP nationalist model has its cosmopolitan double in the Paintbrush Factory in Cluj-Napoca, a former factory with a peculiar architectural structure, ‘soap box’ style, which preserved the evocative name recalling the initial vocation of paintbrush producer held during the communist period. While offering large and small studios to great artists and to ‘selected promises’ and, above all, its solid and internationally recognized “imprint” of reference, the Paintbrush Factory in Cluj is today the most structured example of an associative artistic group which is comprised of in-house artists and galleries with the support of the strategic leader gallery, Plan B. A gallery which can be seen as a kind of sputnik–shuttle able to launch artists abroad with a certain frequency.

My Brain. Last Frontier (2013) by Mihai ZGONDOIU

On the opposite side of the private sector but without the support of a safety net, there is another version, as if filmed with a Super 8 camera, of artists who move in the equally degraded framework of the real estate, in a situation which doesn’t greatly differ from other European capitals. It is a familiar scenario, obviously, colored with some local peculiarities. Here we can see artists who are ‘almost famous’, working in well lighted studios, with autonomous heating and their name on the door bell, but also composite groups of roommate emerging artists (painters, sculptors, street artists, advertisers etc), in tiny fortresses settled in tenement- like houses. And, to finish with a flourish – but not without respect - we can also find artists who live, work and sell from their one room studios and whom – so as to escape from the Polaroid shot – you are forced to meet in bars, while risking indigestion in the end due to so many coffees and fresh juices.

Nubilis (2013) by Mimi CIORA

From the very beginning I have not seen this collection as a ‘top list’ or as a group classification divided in ‘most’, ‘emerging’, ‘not yet’ – such an approach would have required a committee of curators and gallery owners, able to broaden the horizon and the variety of requests. All relevant, for Heaven’s sake, if we only take into account the debate about the right number of artists to select or how to reassert the local specificity of Romanian art among the different movements and tendencies, associated with different schools and opinion trends. Perfectly productive and appropriate arguments, if postponed or sent back for the opening of the exhibition.

Walking Pyramid (2013) by Mircea ROMAN

In the meantime, I came to discover that the Earth is round on my own. The opportunity I had to get acquainted with the richness of proposals and variety of the artistic genres approached allowed me to not surrender so easily in front of the main trend of today’s Romanian art: figurativism. Not by chance and in virtue of the well established influence of the great masters of 20th century Romanian art, the “noul figurativ” continues to still be the “coloana infinită” of Romanian art in the 21st century that, with all its self explanatory peculiarities, is anxious to express the individual and collective desire for memory and witness.

The Book of Genesis (2013) by Onisim COLTA

From the remarkable and precious virtuosity of portrait and self-portrait realization, with a particular expressive power, to the post-communist ‘jazz’ figurativism and to a dark and crepuscular ‘soul’ art: Romanian contemporary art is currently characterized by an individual and collective metaphorical commitment, a ‘darkness still on’, an identity which either fails to be or is afflicted by the Osbornian ‘scandal and concern’ about a society which is unable to find more than a precarious equilibrium among Western capitalism, an unbridled and false one, the Romania felix tradition and religious orthodoxy; thusly finding a chance to overcome the dramatic fracture of more than 40 years of Communism.