At any rate, you could say that I dream of Ghenie. It's no surprise - in his work, I see many things I'd like my own work to be. His paintings maintain a delicate balance of order and chaos - everything seems rational even though it's been scraped with a trowel and repainted a dozen times. His color palette frequently switches between monochrome and vibrant and it works either way. At least on a formal level, I look at Ghenie's work with envy.
One series of paintings, "The Collector," shows the infamous Nazi looter Hermann Goering looking at his collection of stolen artwork. Another series is called "Pie Fight" and depicts serious-looking suited men throwing pies at each other (like the famous deleted ending from Dr. Strangelove). Other uplifting themes in Ghenie's oeuvre include Lenin's corpse, wolves coming out of the darkness, and seemingly silent scenes of interiors cloaked in shadows. Also, roadside executions.
Ghenie's work also ties in nicely to an exhibition I saw last night. I had been in Chelsea working with a friend on some changes to his website, and once we were done I decided, since it was Thursday, to try and score some free wine at gallery openings. I peeked in a few galleries but didn't see anything amazing until, on 25th street, something caught my eye - a cat.
A brief aside: my little sister, who lives out in LA, loves cats. A lot. Like, way more than most people. She and her fiancee have two of them, and her neighbors (who are practically part of the family) have six. Anyway, here in Williamsburg, there are a lot of cats. Most convenience stores have at least one on the payroll as a mousetrap. Recently, I started taking pictures for her of all the neighborhood cats that I could track down. I saw the cat in Chelsea as an extension of this little project, so I went into the building to snap a few pictures of the little guy.
The little bastard who started it all...I don't want to make hasty assumptions, but if these two are any indication, then damn, there's some good art coming out of Romania these days!
The Romanian artist in the group show "Realm" at Slag Gallery is named Sergiu Toma. One wall of the gallery was devoted to his work. Like his countryman Ghenie, Toma's work is mainly monochromatic with touches of color. The childlike figures look like they were taken from old photographs, but the faces are all blurred or otherwise distorted, like curse victims in The Ring. The nostalgic colors and subjects coupled with the fuzzy rendering brought to mind themes of forgetfulness - forgetting the faces of lost friends from long ago. One large painting, called "Time Machine," had a boy peering into a strange green machine that appeared to be a combination water cooler/drill press. Like the other paintings, the coloration was bleak, save for the viridian green machine. A smaller version, without the boy, was also in the show. I know there have been many times in my life when I wish I had a time machine, or at least the ability to go into a coma at will to sleep through stressful situations.
The forgetfulness that accompanies the endless march of time... and the fact that there are many situations in our lives we would like to forget. Given some of the settings in which Toma placed his characters, I imagine there are things they would like to forget as well.
UPDATE 1/27: Here's another excellent Romanian painter I found. I'm seeing Romanian painters everywhere... someone call Health Services, I think I just saw Szabolcs Veres on my toast!
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