BIOGRAPHY

PROJECTS

Artiști:     
Cristiano Berti (IT)
Vali Chincişan (RO)
Călin Man (RO)
Pericol (RO)
Cristian Stanciu/ Mațe
+ Rolf Onoicenko
Jan Svenungsson (SE/DE)
Kisspal Szabolcs (HU)
Szacsva Y Pál (HU)
 
Long time. Short distance. Or the other way round.

A selection of artists less visible for the Romanian audience who could make a difference there - through the themes they approach, through their aesthetical options and through their personal philosophies. The knowledge platform designed by the Biennial of Young Artists allows a reduction of the mental and physical distances between the artists and the audience, facilitating the development of a more generous space for communication, well deserved by both parties.

Besides that, my choices are purely subjective and based on fortuitous encounters. All the participants are old friends and (some of them) collaborators, with whom I shared along the years a lot of time dedicated to various topics, amongst which the profession of art making was just collateral. Still, each of these artists managed, at a certain point, to bring me into a state of happiness and amazement best qualified by the old adagio of “suspension of disbelief”. I thought it would be interesting to share that.

I can only encourage people to go through the whole 11 minutes of Cristiano Berti’s Exeunte, not only in order to get the “raison d’être” of this obviously conceptual piece with a reading key, but mainly for enjoying a splendid anthology of images and sounds that sum up the melancholy of Italian cinema. Its secret of metaphysical longings, perversely hidden under layers of comical trash share shallow ambitions of transient glory.

Vali Chincişan is the ultimate media artist, who jumped trains from painting into code writing, proving beyond doubt that the roots of creativity in all media are similar. His flash animations based on an exponential matrix are visual embodiments of brain processes under the ecstatic influence of music. Chincişan works are both in direct connection with inner visions and under the pressure of copy provided by third parties. He always translates whatever happens around him into a deeply personal manner; translation is more important than the source; because for him language is more important than the message.

Călin Man is a new media hermit, who lives cocooned in a virtual web of memories and literary analogies. His universe is confined to the Arad of his childhood and youth, a city shaped by the frictions between the tectonic plates of the Balkans and Mittel Europa. The pressure of this cultural clash made it into Calin Man’s production, which is agoraphobic and cosmopolitan, intimate and very abstract, dry and personal. Own and found footage melt into a strange emotional flow that is both public and private, like all good poetry.

Pericol was created by Cristian Stanciu, composer, performer and sound designer, best known as Maţe, and by his partner for this project Rolf Onoicenko. Pericol is a paradigmatic reaction to the explosive development of junk TV in Romania. It stems from Cristian’s enduring fascination with the infinities created through the dynamic ways by which video and sound can mirror each other. His obsession with ethno voices, uttering tear jerking common places, is well supported by a mass media flow that he experiences in his studio, organized as a control tower of the trash culture phenomenon.

For almost two decades now I am puzzled by the fascination exerted on my by Jan Svenungsson’s Chimneys. The transformation of what used to be such a common landscape element during our childhood and youth into down-scaled pieces of public art is so radical in its absurdism that it becomes exhilarating. I have to add immediately that the only way I experienced those works is through the artist’s own photographs. And that makes me wonder if all the structural effort invested in the completion of the real pieces is not just a carefully scripted performance meant to provide props for a photo session. The resulting images are carrying a mix of comical and tragic historical messages and cultural analogies, under the bland appearance of documentary photographs of industrial sites: a sort of Dadaist meeting between Mark Manders and Bernd & Hilla Becker.

I saw Shards of glass years ago, in a group show at Mücsárnok (Budapest’s Kunsthalle), and it stayed with me since then. Kisspal Szabolcs works usually within the weak spots of mass media and technology, where he inserts political understatements meant to test the viewer’s awareness. In this piece, though coincidence plays a paramount role, it becomes the gate towards pure poetry. Simultaneously, the video is an intensely autobiographical confession about the longings of the artist, about nostalgia dreams of freedom, about courageous explorations of the unknown. Mostly, Shards of glass is an example of utopia: rewind history to the moment before crime, then let it flow again, peaceful, pure, impossible.

Szacsva y Pal works in a critical manner with mainstream ideological topics that have animated the cultural discourse of the last decades: body politics, gender power relations, post-colonial rhetoric are compressed with subtle irony in Another finger exercise, a short video which does not miss the opportunity to take a shot at almost everything it touches upon, from the title on. And yet, the result is an intimate piece charged with a delicate sensuality, and eventually the mass media on-going circus is set between the parentheses of the voyeuristic games of the couple.

BIBLIOGRAPHY