Curatorial Statement
Being sheltered by a solid professional and personal partnership,
which reality is involved, therefore we have to admit that, concerning
that has lasted for over than ten years, Ana Maria Micu and Cătălin
these images, we are talking about the juicy and modern concept of
Petrișor work side-by-side, in a complementary and harmonious way
parallel realities.
of perceiving reality through the means of painting. Voluntarily set aside from the tumultuous, but fragmented Romanian Art scene, in
Micu and Petrișor investigate their inner selves by representing those
the sunny town of Craiova, they have nothing but themselves, their
parallel realities and, sometimes, unfamiliar, awkward objects that just
well-preserved, sacred, personal environment and a neverending,
burst into their calm, peaceful and usual surroundings. Temporary
complex and intense fascination for the uniqueness of reality, for the
blindness is just a matter of choice, and not an uncontrolled,
continuous transformation of a contemplative, emotional estate and
distressful fact. You just choose what you want to see.
for the eternal and fashionable, philosophical meaning of a so-called mystère des objets.
With a perpetual changing framework, painting has been sliding along correctness of form and fidelity of rendition, especially after the
The concept chosen for this present show is an abstract and
proliferation of Photorealism in the end of the 60s and the beginning
contradictory experiment, in which the two individuals, working in
of the 70s, when the soul of the artist, all his emotional profile has
the field of visuality, try to imagine themselves as temporarily blinded,
been suppressed for the sake of an antagonistic and seldom offensive
in a solely attempt to record the blurred memory incorporated in
reality. In order to paraphrase Baudrillard's thesis in Simulacra and
an affective distance between two specific moments in the past. The
Simulation (1981), we are talking about something simulated,
condition of being blind, in this artistic case, is similar to William
which has never really existed, but it appears as a visual object in the
James' stream of consciousness narrative mode (1890), a procedure
bidimensional context of a canvas.
that has been lately found all along Modern literature's masterpieces, such as Virginia Woolf 's Mrs. Dalloway, James Joyce's final part of
In Micu's and Petrisor's complementary paintings, all these objects
Ulysses, or William Burroughs' Naked Lunch.
signify something personal, because they do harmoniously and relentlessly coexist with their owners and they did that for a while.
All this emotional flow is thoroughly combined with a very sharp and
They created a life of their own.
allusive way of depicting the surrounding reality, by emphasizing in the same way all the parts of all objects. With this simple, but deeply
Curator
engaged solution, the mystery of objects is inherently present in this inconvenient clarity, which makes us think that there should be something more to explore.
Simona Vilau (b. 1983) is a curator and art writer living and working in Bucharest. She is a freelancer involved in many projects along the last decade, from curatorial projects and research, to artistic projects
The novelty in this current exhibition is related to the emotional
of her own. She is the creator of Artbank Romania online platform
juxtaposition and the physical superposition of two separated images,
and holds a Ph.D. since 2012, on a theme related to the violence of the
generated by the memory of the same author. We cannot know
image in Romanian contemporary art.