the beach Painting

Portable Objects That Will Leave The Workshop At Some Point workshop The artist Adrian Sandu works in a museum. His workshop is in the museum building. In 2015 Adrian Sandu temporarily moved his workshop in the display section of the museum, this dislocation being something provisional. His private workshop was „transported” in the public gallery of a museum. An artist’s workshop is usually found in his home, „in the workshop”. Adrian Sandu’s workshop is in a museum both literally and symbolically. It is as if the display area of the museum got a new look, as if the museum showed us an exhibit called „An artist’s workshop”, a tableau vivant, with typical scenes extracted from the film The artist at work. Indeed, if you say workshop you say the artist at work. But then you might ask yourself: what does the artist Adrian Sandu do in his „new” workshop located in the last two exhibition rooms of the Museum of Arad? Art is what the artist does simply by sitting around in the studio, says Bruce Nauman. If you are an engraver, a painter or a sculptor, things are made simple by the specific constraints of the craft. A painter knows what he has to do when he spends his time in his workshop. But for the generic contemporary artist, that is for the artist that works in a post-studio era, things open up and get complicated. The artist does all kinds of things in his workshop. And now we return to Nauman’s question: If you are not a painter and you do not display your canvas and prepare the oil, if you do not perform the laboratory protocol of an artistic endeavor filled with rituals and old and well-established routines, then what exactly is it that you do when you stay in your workshop ? By moving his engraver and painter’s workshop in the display area of a museum, Adrian Sandu asks this question and tentatively proposes a possible answer. Nevertheless, I felt that the questions and answers do not seem to be of much importance in the transfer. What seems to matter more is the artist’s desire to make this move in front of the eyes of someone other than himself. What is interesting is his „movement” towards painting and displaying it along with the movement of his workshop. For a graphic artist, painting is both liberating and a loss of self.