Power Games

Project exhibited at:

Kunstverein Mistelbach, Austria
May – June 2024
curator: Mariana Ioniță

Brukenthal National Museum, Sibiu, RO
January – February 2024
curator: Alexandru Constantin Chituță

DANA Art Gallery, Iasi, RO
22 February – 27 March 2024
curators: Smaranda Bostan and Maria Bilashevschi

The exhibition project proposed through this series of works is a personal reaction of the author to some of the most pressing issues of the contemporary world, summarized under the formula of power games or struggles between individuals or social classes, to achieve the supreme status, conflicts and confrontations current armies, generated by the numerous geo-strategic, economic and political interests, respectively of certain ontological or spiritual aspects.

The theoretical framework designates the concept of power as a term with multiple meanings and interpretations (political, military, economic, cultural, IT, etc.), which open the way to understanding the behavior of different actors of world politics. Understanding the existing relationships between them inevitably leads to the conclusion that the possession and manifestation of power gradually transforms, starting from its natural forms, into a kind of drug, into a continuous thirst or acute need for power, which does not take into account the costs or risks, much less the rights or needs of the other.

The central idea of ​​the exhibition project starts from a suggestive metaphor in which the animal substitutes for man and his hierarchical interests. This creates a complex image of a dystopian world, partly inspired by George Orwell’s famous short story “Animal Farm”, this time emphasizing the problems of the contemporary world, largely dominated by acute states and phenomena, such as uncertainty , fear, manipulation, pollution, global warming, the continuous struggle for resources, globalization, etc., which tend to drastically influence man’s perception of the environment in which he lives. The animals represented in the paintings and drawings of this exhibition project, some directly but subtly inspired by the creations of great artists of the past, and then reintegrated in contradictory contemporary contexts, thus become an emblem of degraded humanity, capable of resorting to the most drastic forms of control and manipulation, reaching up to total annihilation.

Starting from these premises, the present exhibition proposes multiple interpretation keys, passed through the rational and sensitive filter of the artist in the position of an objective and subjective observer alike, looking for possible answers and solutions regarding the state of the world in which he lives, with all the problems and risks it faces, including self-destruction.

In this complex game of power, man – the great absent concretely or visually, but implicitly or implicitly present in each of the situations described by the works – oscillates between the position of savior of humanity and that of its exterminator, exposing at the same time the inequity power relations manifested between individuals, between social classes, between the strong and the weak. All these indications ultimately lead to the hypothesis assumed by the author, that the visual absence of man and his replacement by the animal, can also be interpreted as an act of moral punishment, to which the artist resorts in a cathartic, atoning and saving sense in finally, through a symbolic process with subtle ontological, spiritual and religious resonances.

Paintings

mixed media on canvas, variable sizes

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Drawings

graphite, charcoal or ink on different types of paper

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