Cultural activity

Wars bring museums

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"There is a godly motivation in the making of man, where we learn how our gait, orientation, and movements that make up our daily existence stretch toward the image, toward what is seen.

And when we think of the order in which God has composed man, we realize that the landscape is prior to the sight/eye, and the body is posterior to contemplation. It is not needless to say that the eye is motivated by the substance of the place to be seen. The Lord began to build us from the head, from the eye.

Walking is a matter strongly determined by sight. The differences between the anterior plane/face and the posterior plane of the body/back are marked by sight and by the fact that we move in the same direction as the plane of sight. Hence the predisposition of the 'back' towards abstract rhetoric and fragility in relation to the concreteness of vision.

The expression "and was killed from behind..." reveals precisely the abstract character of the unsuspected death, its unconsciousness. He will die with his face!

Or: "then he turned his back on the landscape and painted..." means withdrawing from the concrete, taking refuge in the abstract and in the ego. A realist painter is one who does not abandon the concrete, the dead man's bruised hand, the beautiful face of his lover. He is the Van Gogh model, the one who names the seen world and has the courage to see. (I tell you that, at this very moment, as I was on the train taking me to Rome, a blind man passed me. With his cane, he is looking for his way to his seat."¹

The pictorial experience gives me the certainty that the place that contains the painter also determines the organization of perception, like an ineffable study that teaches you to look and investigate, and that insinuates itself through every painted sight.

By approaching Rome, one's own experience attests to a different way of seeing, different from the original way of seeing learned in one's native school and native places. According to its appearance, Rome introduces you into a maelstrom of stimuli, confuses the senses, dilates the pores of sensations, and distorts the commonplaces of visual communication. I dare to say that Rome teaches you to see differently. It's common knowledge that things to see are placed in a different way than is commonplace. Here I look up and down, search under a stone, reveal new insights, develop particular attractions, scrutinize every corner of the view, because I am certain of the richness and maturity of the image. In Rome, anywhere, one can hide painting.

Contemporary art gallery Recycle Nest is hosting an exhibition by Ion Grigorescu and Bogdan Vlăduță until May 28. The two artists dedicate this second installment to the Rome they walked together, after the 2011 show at Ion Grigorescu's studio.

On this occasion, the two artists have published a book on Rome and are also exhibiting a number of works from the latest production of their own studio (paintings on canvas and zinc-plate reliefs). Here is what the two say:

"We are giving for publication in 50 copies this new treatise on painting, hundreds of years after the Renaissance, germinated in the same soil, written more or less in the same de-order in which the observations come simultaneously with the brushwork, but new - painting, from which Vlăduță makes an axiom of the place, of Rome, becomes, reading it, a sum of actions, attempts, extensions, each one more and more distant from classical painting, now there are countless ways of painting, painting comes close to the meaning of 'art'".

Bogdan Vlăduță is the painter who lived in Rome for a long time and where he managed to draw the city, with its mysterious artistic palimpsest and Mediterranean conviviality, into one of his richest painting subjects. Vlăduță remarks, in the recently published book:

"As this is a declaration of love for the past, the timbre of the words can induce excessive pity. In Rome, a place flooded by the metaphysics of antiquity, where actuality ends in a remarkable failure, the pictorial dynamic has undergone an obvious change. I have been drawn in by the energies of the old and involved in the largest project of my affectivity. I am not the one who chose to paint my pictures depicting the City, I am not the one who stirred up the lover's song, but neither am I where I am now, enduring the hard reunion with the Citadel, not from my own calling. None of this I could control or premeditate, it was all decided with my first admiration of the City.

On a metaphysical and iconographic level, Rome possesses the expression of evidence, an unrepeatable potential in European urban history, but also an opportunity waiting to be activated under the sign of art. The encounter with the place can only become fruitful under the sign of the "relief" image and the characteristics that Tradition indicates: the real measure, the adumbration of fiction through the revival of figurative models and the rhetoric of advancement/innovation through return/recidivism as an artistic mentality.

What does Rome offer the painter today? Under the sign of nature, the Romans intuited and cultivated the school of preserving remarkable solutions for composing landscape forms. Their gardeners developed some of the highest examples of parks and green areas in terms of compositional arrangements (landscaping), conservation concepts, their ability to link up with urban structures, and the spontaneous response of nature. From the perspective of personal experience, my study attempts to discuss a possible metabolism of emotions that a painter experiences when confronted with Rome. I have also found important the findings that capture, at least on a global level, the way in which nature is organized in the cultic 'parentheses' of the city, to the point of blending with urban constructions, ultimately proliferating the frames of the Roman landscape."

"Where to? How many exhibitions will you do? Where do you want to go? In the first, from the studio in the courtyard of the Storck Museum, you have defined your own points of view, those of the one who takes images on the spot and those of the one who moves only in imagination. But the one in Rome is in fact dreaming of the blending of the past into what he sees, and the one in Romania is documenting at Adamclisi how the barbarians, those who never got to see the capital, Rome, imagined it. So you both make use of each other's strategies, because regardless of your presence, your consciousness, it is the unconscious that compels you, this central human settlement, about which it is said: 'all roads lead to it; see it and then die'.

Today we have a book written by Bogdan Vlăduță, but modeled by Ion Grigorescu, and the last words of the afterword are about a "blind man". With what a tone: "I tell you truly that at this moment..."! The urgency, the alarm, comes from the Fate that you cannot fight, that is to say, from the Unconscious already mentioned. We say "unconscious", but, by unknown means, knowledge comes to us, it's a different kind of conscious. The blind man, about whom Vlăduță says "Grigorescu imagines Rome with the tip of the pencil inventing the blind man's solutions", we understand him - we are all blind, even working with the computer by the book, any tool (here called "pencil") is a cane.

"See it!" we cheer: "reaching" will be the end of the two's exhibitions.

The urgency and anxiety also come from the question "what kind of present are we witnessing?" because what we see (or museum exhibits) are the results of massacres, whether in Rome, Kabul or Bucharest, writes Vlăduță, this time on the painting itself, on a picture of Bucharest. Thus we return to an unconscious, this time Freudian (see Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, translated by Editura All, Discomfort in culture, 2011), man being driven by both the vital and the lethal instinct, artistic action being guided (we return to the blind) by sublimation (of evil, of trauma) and neurosis, by the disruption of the quiet, of the good."²