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17/4/2012

Liane Birnberg

MNAC - The National Museum of Contemporary Art, Bucharest

curator Oana Tanase

The engine lids of Ilea, or about memory, people and events

One could, without being too far from the truth, label artist Gheorghe Ilea as orthodox. This label would however fail to grasp something essential in the way the spiritual dimension un-arrogantly permeates his art. One can label him as an artist of the 80’s, but that would also fail to reveal the entire complexity of an extremely varied creation, which is more than just the product of a stylistic or conceptual context. Or one could regard him as a nostalgic, but again that would not succeed in describing the essential role of his relationship with the past, or his truly impressive capacity of using memories for the more or less coherent – but certainly savory - circumscription of history.

Quietly lonesome, but not isolated, Ilea is a “endurance” artist, and, at the same time an artist who has constantly proved himself capable of both patience (understood also as an opening for reflection) and renewal (sometimes at a playful level). Fascinated by objects which hint at anthropology or metaphysics, he depicts them in rich and sensuous paintings. Passionate in his painting, and free of any fetishes for technical recipes, he does not hesitate to choose unconventional supports, surfaces which condition but at the same time enhance the expressivity of the painting material.

Completed recently, in a – not rush – but rather a certain type of verve, the Tronicart project seems to fit more of the above mentioned definitions of Gheorghe Ilea’s art. The fifty-six engine lids of Dacia 1300 are objects both common and semantically charged, as they un-avoidably recall the social and political realities of communist Romania. On these lids he paints, draws and writes, subjects which, on the whole, create a somewhat implausible self-portrait and a brief, arbitrary, but savory autobiography. The images speak of his home and barn in Bucea – so dear to him, of the interwar voyage of his mother to London, of the Bible and of important Romanian Orthodox personalities, of the hopes and terrors of the nuclear age, or of the intimacy of the kitsch decorations. Some are elaborated abstract compositions, or just depict the Romanian flag in a rich and succulent painting. Other paintings bring back old-fashioned but not yet harmless images of a totalitarian propaganda. The texts refer to The Socialist Republic of Romania and the USSR, to clichés, to family stories, to books and to the Dacia brand of cars itself – this derisory object of desire. All these create a semantic amalgam, spontaneous rather then decidedly programmatic.

Irony and self-irony are frequent, as they function, perhaps in a similar way with the intentional naivety and the direct, warm humor, as defense mechanisms in a dictatorial and absurd world. Irony and humor are joined by friendship (see the images with his good friend, the artist Komives Andor), by feelings of familial affection (like in the works Our first TV Set and Our Barn in Bucea), by a contained drama (the references to his colleague Matis Lucian, killed in December 1989), or by a calm nostalgia of his childhood (the references to the Cutezatorii magazine). Ilea’s engine lids, as they will most likely be known in the future, build the image, filtered and deformed as it is, of a life - part of a history which some people can identify as their own.

Bogdan Iacob is an art critic and historian, professor at the Art and Design University in Cluj.

MNAC Partener: BRD Groupe Societe Generale
Sponsor: Murfatlar
Media partners: Igloo habitat & arhitectura, Zeppelin, 24Fun, Radio France Internationale, feeder.ro, Cocor MediaChannel

MNAC National Museum of Contemporary Art
Izvor St. 2-4, wing E4, Bucharest, Romania / Entrance from Calea 13 Septembrie
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