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23/3/2007

Ciprian Muresan

Kontainer Gallery, Los Angeles

I Believe I Can Fall

Kontainer is pleased to present Romanian artist Ciprian Muresan in his first solo exhibition in the US. Ciprian Muresan lives and works in Cluj, Romania and belongs to the youngest generation of Romanian artists getting considerable attention worldwide. He is one of the founders of Verizon Magazine with Mircea Cantor and has exhibited widely in public spaces throughout Europe, and he will be featured in the forthcoming Prague Biennale in May 2007.

For his show at Kontainer, Ciprian Muresan will present a set of drawings, a photograph, “Leap into the Void – After 3 Seconds”, and two videos, “Rhinoceros” and “3D Rubliov”.

'Romanian Blood’ is a drawing which very succinctly makes the point about national identity, that never-ending drama, and the ways in which its expressions go astray, lose touch with reality and take off to a cozy, self-referential universe. The work presents an incompatible act, a paradox: what would come out of the veins of a true patriot were he/ she to commit suicide? – a fairly festive tricolor stream or ribbon, but on the other hand a true patriot would never commit suicide and deprive the nation of his/ her supportive zeal. The higher danger is not the dementia of leaders and their promiscuous relation to national identity, but complicity, whereby tricolor frenzy or nationalistic reflexes infiltrate the mental habits of those subjected to them and are internalized. Ciprian disagrees with any system that “places the made-up idea of nation before the individual” and believes that the former no longer has any historical legitimacy. “The Romanian nation died. What is left are individuals only. They assume this identity or they don’t, yet society is formed on other premises than the idea of the nation”. A large part of Ciprian Muresan’s recent production evinces a keen understanding of the logic of the readymade, a passionate engagement with the convolutions of modern or contemporary art and the question of translation.

His 'Leap into the Void – After 3 Seconds’, restages Yves Klein’s jump towards the aesthetic sublime. The artist now lies crushed on the sidewalk and the man riding the bicycle is slightly further away. The difference of three seconds is equivalent with a difference of 40 years and cultural paradigm, while changing ideas of the climactic moment – between anticipated denouement with its aura of mystery and, on the other hand, a literal, obvious, visually striking conclusion – are explored, as the critic Cosmin Costina_ noted.

"Rhinoceros“ is a subtle comment upon being and abandonment. For this video, Ciprian Muresan worked with and recorded a group of children from an elementary school in Iasi (Northern Romania). In his fi lm, the children read from Eugène Ionesco’s well-known play, Rhinoceros, about the metamorphosis of man into a rhino. The sound of the children’s voices unsettles and disturbs the moral consciousness of the viewer, shifting the emphasis of this metamorphosis from the responsibility of the individual to its collective germination.

Finally, the video 'Rubliov’ renders in 3D animation certain scenes from Tarkovsky’s 'Andrei Rubliov’. Writing the unlimited possibilities of 3D animation into the original (which dealt with sturdily 2D icons) without destroying it – on the contrary, replicating it in detail – appears here as an infinitely delicate act which collapses preservation and translation. It is less the mimetic logic, the relation between original and copy that the works seek to examine or undermine, but rather an attempt to mark the temporal distance between the two versions as the space of representation itself.

For more information, please contact Mihai Nicodim at the gallery +1 213 621 2786 or at info@kontainergallery.com

Image: Ciprian Muresan, "Romanian Blood", 2005, Pencil on paper

Private View Saturday 24 March, 6 – 8 pm

Kontainer Gallery
944 Chung King Road Los Angeles, CA 90012

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