Babylonia

Project exhibited at Aparte Gallery of UNAGE Iasi, May 31 – June 7, 2017

The artist Adrian Stoleriu opens to the public from Iași with the launch of the Babylonia exhibition, held at the Aparte gallery, the series of inquiries regarding the everyday culture of consumption and frivolity. The exhibition is dense, both from the visual point of view, of the techniques used by the artist, and from the point of view of the variety of concepts and messages addressed. This is a natural fact that shows the artist’s intention to build a rigorous analysis on contemporary social behaviors, media discourses circulated in the national press, tabloid-type images or various dysfunctions of post-socialist and hybrid-capitalist autochthonous societies.

The social analysis aims at common themes present in the existence of those around us, such as the breakdown of the family by increasing the mobility of the labor force, public disputes regarding the vaccination of children, illegal deforestation and genetically modified organisms, the inversion of moral values, etc. Adrian Stoleriu’s works included in the Babylonia exhibition follow two seemingly antagonistic discursive directions under the same dome. On the one hand, the artist critically analyzes the news discourse circulated in Romania by the main private televisions, a strongly tabloidized discourse, which presents the entire process of excessive, chaotic and frivolous cultural hybridization. In the opposite direction, he presents us with works that clearly belong to the moralizing reactionary framework, doubled by a religious substrate of Christian-Orthodox inspiration. These two complementary directions, however, are essentially intended to structure and solidify the main message that the artist brings to the fore, a message of post-humanist origins in which man as a social entity becomes a mass, an object, a number, lacking any anchoring spiritual, be it superficial or deep.

From the first category of works we can mention the Breaking News series composed of a video installation and a series of graphic images, processed in a minimalist style after images taken directly from TV news shows. The video installation emphasizes the rapid and chaotic sequence of images and sounds, a process intended to further emphasize the fragility of the coherence and consistency of reading a televised message. In the same graphic style we are presented with Life Sketches, a series of graphic compositions, which illustrate, as the artist himself claims, different contradictory situations of everyday life. From the idea of ​​manipulation through text and image in They never lose, to the practice of the selfie or outdoor barbecue as the ultimate form of entertainment, to climate problems or excessive deforestation (Symphony of Chainsaws) and to the problem of food increasingly more artificial (GMO/GMO, Recipe of the day) the artist archives mediatized but unresolved aspects of today’s society, be it national or global. We thus observe how the discourse starts from a domestic framework, but it largely aims at global aspects of contemporaneity.

The complementary category of works includes two video installations in which the saving recourse to a lost spirituality is combined with social ideas of humanist inspiration in an era of post-humanism. Katharsis brings to the fore the idea of ​​symbolic washing of memory and consciousness, a utopian process in which material aestheticization becomes the support of the concept. The video installation, exhibited as a double projection, Ritual of Humanization invokes, through the utterance of seemingly banal verbs by different people, invokes, in an intimate setting, primary psychological needs as a first step towards a process of collective healing. Babylonia remains the central installation of the exhibition and is composed of three parts. The central part of the gallery is supported by a construction composed of several wooden stairs that symbolically restructures the Tower of Babel, after the model of the painting of the same name made by Pieter Bruegel the Elder in 1563. Part of the floor of the gallery becomes a support for another symbolic work, material composed of earth, nails and an egg patinated with silver leaf, which brings to our attention the idea of ​​time. And the last work in this trilogy, Equality, occupies the frontal wall of the gallery and is composed of wooden stairs and a central portrait, in turn a symbol of the universal face of the present.

The diversity of the mediums and techniques approached, as well as the oscillation between cult iconographic references and popular culture, proves the conceptual flexibility of the artist, who is in a phase of constructive searches.

(“Can chaos be narrated?”, text by Oana Maria Nicută, Iasi 2017)

Works included in the “Babylonia” exhibition project

(selection)