Under Construction Painting

Romania's recent history can be characterized as an enormous construction site, in which the unfinished project of modernization and socialist industrialization was replaced by the privatization of public space and the development of the service industry. The painting proposed in the Under Construction project is the result of a theoretical research on the motifs of ruins and its representation in contemporary art. Such a metaphor evokes, of course, the romantic aesthetics of the fragment, and the nostalgia of a lost world, the ruins of industrial society appearing as many testimonies of a time out of the womb of modernist progress and located in an apparently post-historical condition. The uniqueness of this large pictorial proposal, which evokes the academic tradition of historical painting, is the ability to rethink the medium in a transitive manner. In other words, it resides in the attempt to incorporate in the space of representation its own production process and the material history of the circulation of images that stabilize temporarily on the surface of the canvas. By inviting the public to discover an image beneath a layer of plaster, the painting becomes not only interactive and participatory, but also sculptural, objective, palpable. The conventional process of reading an image, which incorporates the pleasure of discovering meaning, is materialized and doubled here by the collective gesture of blasting a layer of plaster that functions as an interface, more precisely, as an opaque screen for the image behind it. In this way, the spectator is invited to participate in a cultural act of reconstruction of collective memory and retributive justice performed at a symbolic level, recovering images of a possible collective memory buried by the new social constructions. At the same time, at the level of the exhibition approach understood as a community micro-laboratory, this pictorial device requires a collective effort necessary for any possible social reconstruction. But, at the same time, the doubling of the pictorial screen within the imagined construction and its multiplication by references to the pictorial fragments exposed together with this central piece suggest that there is no authentic image camouflaged by ideology, of the public transformed into a social actor leads to nothing but another possible representation of a generic, imaginary, difficult (and ultimately useless) space to identify outside the pictorial representation itself. Thus, the present pictorial proposal not only incorporates the context in which it is produced and exposed. It also produces a context in which painting can (re) become performative, communicating at the level of materiality that is organized on the surface of representation rather than through its representational content.

Painting:Oil on Canvas

Original:One-of-a-kind Artwork

Size:189 W x 59.1 H x 1.2 D in

Delivery Time:Typically 5-7 business days for domestic shipments, 10-14 business days for international shipments.