Art Pickings from Exhibitions, Articles, Books, and the Web
Cairn: noun \ˈkern\ A pile of stones that marks a place (such as the place where someone is buried or a battle took place) or that shows the direction of a trail.
via Balancing Act — My OBT (which shows a good number of amazing images documenting these works)
Laura (lunchhourlondon) spends two of her one-hour lunch breaks hunting public contemporary art works in London.
Challenge: Public Contemporary Art
Lunch breaks taken: 2/5
Rating: Enchanting
I have fallen back in love with lunch breaks! Not that I was ever out of love with them, but the past couple of months of busy-ness and subsequently no midday time away from my desk meant that I had gotten used to being a bit lazy. There’s definitely a cosy satisfaction to spending all day at your desk, even though you know it makes you feel drained and heavy by the end of the day. I guess it’s a bit like staying in your pyjamas all weekend: you feel slightly gross, but at the same time self-indulgent.
Because of this, it took me a few weeks to shake off the sluggishness and motivate myself to actually get away from my desk. I undertook the last couple of challenges with a slightly lacklustre approach, not really engaging with them with…
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As part of the White Night of the Galleries (September 30), the alternative gallery space at Dr. Iacob Felix no. 72A hosted an installation called Road, about the road of life.
The piece that intrigued me the most, despite its simple concept, showed a family photo and a number of medicine package inserts, blisters of pills, and prescriptions pinned to an old light brown overcoat. The garment hung from the ceiling and a side wall, and underneath it was a pile of medicine packets, pill bottles, and blister packs. The label read Bătrânețea (Old Age), by Rene Răileanu.
The piece, with the medicine signifiers replacing the body of the person, made me think how in our old age we’re shaped by suffering and how the fact that we’re still standing under that coat is due to the many medicines we take, medicines which help numb that suffering but which, in many ways, take over our identity as we become more and more concerned with our health, talk often about our ailments, and are perceived through the lens of our illnesses by others. And then there’s the family portrait at the top—what most of us hold most dear in our waning years.
Rene Răileanu is mostly a figurative painter. If you want to see some more of his work, here’s his website.
Walking about Amzei Square yesterday evening, I stopped at Amzei Market Makers to see their current exhibition (curated by Beti Vervega and Mădălina Mirea). One of the artists included in the show was Vlad Basarab (b. 1977, Bucharest), a graduate of the Ceramics section of the University of Alaska Anchorage, as well as of two MFA programs in the US, currently a PhD student in visual arts at the National University of the Arts in Bucharest.
Vlad Basarab is mostly known for the clay books in his Archaeology of Memory series. You can see a photo on ArtOut, accompanying Mădălina Panduru’s interview with the artist, and a video on YouTube, showing in 4 minutes and 31 seconds the way one of these books dissolves under the week-long attritive action of water. In the interview, Vlad Basarab explains that he has left the pages blank in order to allude to oblivion and absence, and to stimulate the viewer to imagine what might have been in those books. Along the same lines, the disintegration of the book suggests the loss of collective memory. For more info in English on Vlad Basarab, see this page from the online art portal Modernism.
I didn’t get to see his books yesterday, but the works he did contribute to the show were rather strong, too. They were called Oameni Pământ nr. 1 (Earth People No. 1) and Oameni Pământ nr. 2 (Earth People No. 2), and they played with his favorite media, the elementary materials of earth, water, and fire. I thought they were quite inspired. Here they are.
I found this sculpture in the Old Town last night, as part of Bucharest’s tenth edition of the White Night of the Art Galleries, which included a ten-year retrospective at ARCUB. Titled simply Madonna, it’s a work from 2014 by Michele Bressan (b. 1980, Trieste, Italy), who has been residing in Bucharest since 1993.
I’m showing it because this Virgin Mary covered in wax drips made me think of her as carrying our prayers as a light burden . . .
Here are some more shots of her from today.
I saw two portraits by Daniela Donțu at Elite Art Gallery a few days ago, and was quite struck by her technique and aesthetic. Here’s Stări (1) / States [of Mind] (1) and Gânduri / Thoughts.
![Daniela Dontu, States [of Mind] (1), at Elite Art Center](https://miratudor.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/img_5407_daniela-dontu_states-of-mind_1_elite-art-gallery1.jpg?w=656)
For some reason I couldn’t identify right away, I found these paintings mesmerizing. It took some photographing of old photos to realize what has drawn me to Donțu’s work, States [of Mind] (1) in particular. It’s the way the fluid handling of paint creates the suggestion of reflection-filled layers, as if you were looking at the man through a series of windows—or veils of affective memory.
I visited the new exhibition at Victoria Art Center yesterday, and, while I liked all the pieces, I was quite impressed with one of them in particular, Cătălin Burcea’s The First and The Last Step (Primul și ultimul pas, in Romanian).
The work consists of four segments of charred wood laid upon a narrow bed of sand. First things first: why four pieces and a single log? The parts may be a reference, perhaps, to the four nucleotide bases of a DNA strand, or, alternatively, to the idea of steps—considered separately from the first and the last step mentioned in the title. Moving on, it’s easy to see why these pieces of wood, passed through fire, a step before returning to the earth as ashes, is the last step (and you can see in the detail below how chips of it are already coming loose and taking that road). But how is it the first step? Maybe the fire that consumes us is a spiritual moment that allows us to be born. Maybe we’re already charred wood when we’re born (the old idea of birth as the first step towards death). I feel it’s this second idea, tied to birth, that gives this piece its oomph. The idea that with every breath we take we die a little—just as a light breeze will eat at this charred log.
Here’s a detail.
On my way to 418 Contemporary Art Gallery three weeks ago I came across a nice mural on General Eremia Grigorescu St. nearby. Enjoy!
I was revisiting today Niki de Saint Phalle’s Shooting Paintings (Tirs) of the early 1960s, where for the most part she creates plaster-covered canvases or assemblages and shoots at plastic bags or spray cans concealed within these sculptural paintings—thus doing painting, sculpture, assemblage, and performance art all at once. (To which we should add the photos and films which document the shooting sessions or her creative process.)
What I love about her Tirs is that she starts from Pollock’s action painting, which is so often regarded as very macho, and makes it seem rather feeble. Niki de Saint Phalle doesn’t dance around her canvases pouring out her emotions in a balanced fashion but rather takes aim at those paint containers and renders her works finished in a way that posits her as a powerful agent who has found a way to stand up to the violence in her life and the world around her.
In a future post I’ll look at her Nanas, voluptuous, colorful, and life-affirming, which she started creating in 1964 after her Tirs series.
I wrote something a few days ago about Santiago Sierra’s 396 Women. The House of the People. Bucharest, Romania. October of 2005, which I saw in July 2011 at the Contemporary Art Center in Málaga, Spain, and, as I often do, I went to Google afterward looking up photomontages of different kinds, in particular that species where a scene is composed through various details observed at different moments; where photography becomes a conduit akin to writing, the artist’s and viewer’s gaze dwelling on particular details as they move through a landscape.
Here are some of my favorite examples, courtesy of the artist Matthew Chase-Daniel. Notice how in Panamint Valley, California his gaze runs back and forth. Wonderful! Just as precious are the others, where the focus is calibrated within a smaller range, but with just enough difference from shot to shot to suggest the presence of the artist adjusting his presence to that of the fields of vision he’s in.
To see more photomontages by Chase-Daniel and his explorations in other media, visit his website.
The Art Dive 