Ciprian Muresan
23 Oct - 18 Dec 2009
CIPRIAN MURESAN
23 October – 18 December 2009
Galeria Plan B is pleased to announce the opening of the new gallery location at the former paint brush factory in Cluj, with a solo exhibition by Ciprian Muresan (born 1977 in Cluj). A new publication on the works of Ciprian Muresan will be launched, titled ‘Artists Book’ – published by Plan B and edited by Mihnea Mircan.
The affective and artistic principle that structures Ciprian Muresan’s exhibition at Plan B Cluj is affinity: for Saviana Stanescu’s text, for the effort – the immaterial Stakhanovism – that Tom Chamberlain’s painting does not betray, for Hans Holbein’s ‘Ambassadors’ and for the artists who contribute texts, about and for Ciprian, to the book published with this occasion.
‘Artists Book’ is an indirect declaration of admiration and a reflection on art history, on how canons are articulated from the perspective of the work and of the artist, rather than from that of institutional codes organizing the discipline. Some of the artists who, in vastly different ways, have had a formative impact on Ciprian’s artistic evolution are invited to comment upon works that resemble theirs, that prove conjunctions – voluntary or not –, conversations and friendship, an emulation or a solidarity linking common practices, even if from different generations and geographies. Geta Bratescu, Nedko Solakov or Emily Katrencik write about works that could, in their turn, trigger an affinity. Alongside older projects like ‘Un chien andalou’, ‘Leap Into The Void, After Three Seconds’ or ‘3D Rubliov’, the book has an undisciplined rapport to art history.
Often used and represented as a warehouse of objects, organized chronologically, where the primal scene of encountering the Original is rehearsed repeatedly, art history gains verisimilitude when traversed by desires and anxieties, by imprecise translations and hazardous permutations, if everything that suggests a smooth unfolding towards a denouement – when the archive is complete and art ceases to be – is questioned as a rhetoric and institutional instrument. When artistic or critical practice interrogates discursive lacunae and breaches in the discipline, suspended moments that neither proceed directly from their own past, nor lead to us as their inevitable confirmation.
The Original is always an anamorphosis, as Donald Preziosi notes, an image allowing for scrutiny on conditions that it itself specifies, intelligible solely inside the code it carries. It is for this reason that Holbein’s ‘Ambassadors’ is an emblem for art history: the skull becomes legible as such only if looked at from a raking angle, therefore from a position that is first epistemological, then mystical, as it situates the viewer directly under the crucifix. From this oblique perspective, Ciprian’s choice to present the skull frontally is overdetermined. The drawing evacuates anamorphosis, the ironic alternative being to imagine the Ambassadors transformed into a diffuse smudge of color, while the melancholy in the original enfolds. The un-coded access to an image translated in its own indirect perspective, therefore in inadequate terms, is an elliptic comment on the mechanisms of validation and exclusion that ensure the ‘flow’ of art history, and sets the scene for ‘Dog Luv’, a shadowy and unsettling dialogue on the definitions of the non-human, and for another work – a video that is almost impassible, longer than a working day, about an almost inexistent painting. Tom Chamberlain’s repetitive gestures seem to ceaselessly measure the canvas; his activity invokes the tropes of the ‘unknown masterpiece’, the historiography of ‘the agony’ and ‘the ecstasy’, but also the problem of digital reproduction, applied to a practice that defies it, at the same time anterior and ulterior to our technological present.
The exhibition text was written by Mihnea Mircan, Romanian curator based in Bucharest.
23 October – 18 December 2009
Galeria Plan B is pleased to announce the opening of the new gallery location at the former paint brush factory in Cluj, with a solo exhibition by Ciprian Muresan (born 1977 in Cluj). A new publication on the works of Ciprian Muresan will be launched, titled ‘Artists Book’ – published by Plan B and edited by Mihnea Mircan.
The affective and artistic principle that structures Ciprian Muresan’s exhibition at Plan B Cluj is affinity: for Saviana Stanescu’s text, for the effort – the immaterial Stakhanovism – that Tom Chamberlain’s painting does not betray, for Hans Holbein’s ‘Ambassadors’ and for the artists who contribute texts, about and for Ciprian, to the book published with this occasion.
‘Artists Book’ is an indirect declaration of admiration and a reflection on art history, on how canons are articulated from the perspective of the work and of the artist, rather than from that of institutional codes organizing the discipline. Some of the artists who, in vastly different ways, have had a formative impact on Ciprian’s artistic evolution are invited to comment upon works that resemble theirs, that prove conjunctions – voluntary or not –, conversations and friendship, an emulation or a solidarity linking common practices, even if from different generations and geographies. Geta Bratescu, Nedko Solakov or Emily Katrencik write about works that could, in their turn, trigger an affinity. Alongside older projects like ‘Un chien andalou’, ‘Leap Into The Void, After Three Seconds’ or ‘3D Rubliov’, the book has an undisciplined rapport to art history.
Often used and represented as a warehouse of objects, organized chronologically, where the primal scene of encountering the Original is rehearsed repeatedly, art history gains verisimilitude when traversed by desires and anxieties, by imprecise translations and hazardous permutations, if everything that suggests a smooth unfolding towards a denouement – when the archive is complete and art ceases to be – is questioned as a rhetoric and institutional instrument. When artistic or critical practice interrogates discursive lacunae and breaches in the discipline, suspended moments that neither proceed directly from their own past, nor lead to us as their inevitable confirmation.
The Original is always an anamorphosis, as Donald Preziosi notes, an image allowing for scrutiny on conditions that it itself specifies, intelligible solely inside the code it carries. It is for this reason that Holbein’s ‘Ambassadors’ is an emblem for art history: the skull becomes legible as such only if looked at from a raking angle, therefore from a position that is first epistemological, then mystical, as it situates the viewer directly under the crucifix. From this oblique perspective, Ciprian’s choice to present the skull frontally is overdetermined. The drawing evacuates anamorphosis, the ironic alternative being to imagine the Ambassadors transformed into a diffuse smudge of color, while the melancholy in the original enfolds. The un-coded access to an image translated in its own indirect perspective, therefore in inadequate terms, is an elliptic comment on the mechanisms of validation and exclusion that ensure the ‘flow’ of art history, and sets the scene for ‘Dog Luv’, a shadowy and unsettling dialogue on the definitions of the non-human, and for another work – a video that is almost impassible, longer than a working day, about an almost inexistent painting. Tom Chamberlain’s repetitive gestures seem to ceaselessly measure the canvas; his activity invokes the tropes of the ‘unknown masterpiece’, the historiography of ‘the agony’ and ‘the ecstasy’, but also the problem of digital reproduction, applied to a practice that defies it, at the same time anterior and ulterior to our technological present.
The exhibition text was written by Mihnea Mircan, Romanian curator based in Bucharest.