Beyond the Top — Paintings from Cluj — Dominique Fiat Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: September 11 → October 11, 2014

Oana Farcas

“The immediacy of Oana Farcas’s work is identifiable in its pictorial matter. Her paintings are constantly qualifying her pictorial research, altering it, re-inventing it over again and in dissimilar keys. She relates monochromes with memory and dreams, or juxtaposes colours and photographic effects within everyday narratives. She stages an uncanny reality for the viewer, composed of pieces of realistic representational content and fictional elements. It is at this threshold between alchemy and mimesis that Farcas’s last series of works is negotiated.

Characterized by an elevated degree of magic, the central theme of this series is light. She uses light as an instrument of ritual that dazzles the viewer with reflections in the actual play of light, reinforcing the significance of artworks as visual vehicles charged with communicational energy. She casts light into the frantic speed of exchanges between humans, among each other and with their environment.¹"

Robert Fekete

In his recent works Robert Fekete incorporates in his composition the direct contact between the observed and the observer, or the adjacency of different states of remembrance.

The artist has derived the first from Caspar David Friedrich and the second from Edward Munch. The characters appear very often from behind, in the first case placed in front of the landscapes they’re looking at, and in the second case next to the landscapes that have lived and shared.Fekete decomposes the observation inside and outside the work to investigate the reality of the relations between peoples.

He often carries a scene from one painting to another by varying the size of the panel and by cutting the image differently even if the frame remains the same, making from an horizontal painting a vertical one, and the larger one can be a detail of a much smaller painting. In the case of the surface of the painting he divides the compoistion into compartments, one for the characters, another for the landscape, and a block for iridescent colors.

For Fekete the painting is an object whose dimensionality does not pretend the third dimension but accepts it by putting it at the heart of the scene, as reproduced image or as a structure attached to different sections.

The work does not pretend but then accepts his fiction, investigating directly the reality of the person who is watching the work.

Sergiu Toma

“My paintings are marked by the timeless fervency of their visual description. The presumably “casual” scenes seem interlocked with partially remembered dreams, where the beholder’s viewpoint becomes an integral part of the painting.

I am attached to details and I usually depict stereotype inside rooms where familiar objects carry symbolic meanings and nonhuman forms are often used as objects of displacement, to bring up issues that cannot be expressed forthrightly.

The rooms are shady and temporary places and the legacy of the traditions is decomposed in this tinkered contemporary set.

This prototype interiors stand in a half country-side half urban whose walls are covered with purple painted wallpapers, furnished with old-fashioned armchairs, cupboards and stoves, rather modest, clean and tastefully decorated with great attention to detail. I was trying to reveal my strength tie to tradition using symbolic elements to give a deeper meaning to the composition."

¹ Text by Adina Drinceanu from “in the light, out of sight”.