The Dust Cliffs
Dust collected in Bucharest in Berceni, earth, ash with acrylic medium on canvas, 80X120 cm, 2007
Stefanica Daniel collection
marți, 4 februarie 2014
The Dust Cliffs
The Dust Cliffs
Dust collected in Bucharest in Berceni, earth, ash with acrylic medium on canvas, 80X120 cm, 2007
Stefanica Daniel collection
luni, 3 februarie 2014
Dust 2 Dust
Nicolae Comanescu doesn't dust off. He paints for you with some Bucharest dust a new facade.
The dust settles everywhere - on you, on the furniture, on the window pane, on the plants in your room, the computer and the car hood.
There is no sense in getting rid of it. The more you see work being done in the city the more dust gets produced. They are digging now for more dust.
This dust of Bucharest is the living grit of this city. Fragments from everything around us gather and collapse together. A powder composed out of earth, sand, scruff, dead skin cells, acarian droppings, and a lot of lost particles, blown around. The dust gets everywhere and maybe it is the most basic ingredient of this city. It has a double origin. It is part of the Great Baragan Plain, the proof of desertification and errosion. And it is also rising from the trenches of unfinished construction sites, eating into the guts of the capital. The blocks, the streets, the rooftops are not visible any more trough some fake sepia - the false preciosity of the past. Nicolae Comanescu reports on a city suffering under heat stroke, baking under the Simun, blowing North of Sahara. Bucharest city - the city seen only with dust in your eyes on top of your block of flats. Gone are the big city traps, sprung in this Las Vegas of the South, shining under cazino lights. Left behind is a metropolis griding your teeth to dust.
Stefan Tiron
duminică, 2 februarie 2014
DUST 2.0
A very short History of Dust in Art
Art seems to employ a myriad of textures and materials – and even no materials at all – in order to express itself. Yet there is something which has been used from the very start of this thing called art, when our cave-dwelling ancestors began leaving their spiritual mark on this world. I am talking about dust, about dirt, earth, humus. The Neolithic "artist" imprinted his thought firstly and foremost by using charcoal and various types of dust, preferably of the reddish variety. The results are stunning even nowadays, after millennia and millennia. And they are born out of one of the most elemental materials available to humankind, something that just lies around in every corner and, indeed, everywhere one cares to look.
Dust in itself is not very versatile, and surely our ancestors noted this. The results of this observation is that they mixed it with animal fat to make stick around for longer. I should say that ten thousand years is a pretty long period of time, and I wish many other art pieces would last even hundred times less. But you see, they don't build things this durable these days, isn't it?
But we are not here to talk about how long things last, but about how things are made, and what are they made of. Making art by using dust is, as we all know, nothing new. Apart from cave paintings, dust (or rather special pigments from special soils) has been used in paints from the ancient Egyptians onwards, by peoples from all the corners of the world. We are going to jump over millennia, then, and look at the use of proper dust while creating works of contemporary art. We are not speaking of tempera, oil colours or gouaches made with ground-based pigments, but dust-dust, the kind that gets on your clothing when you take a fall outside, that sticks to your shoes, and is swept by street sweepers with their big brooms and mechanised aspirators and other cleaning implements.
There are several contemporary artists who have left their mark in dust in recent times: I will only mention Vik Muniz, Allison Cortson, Mona Vatamanu and Florin Tudor, Zhang Huan. We could also add to the count the great Antoni Tapies and several exponents of Arte Povera, but that would bring another dimension to this discussion. The art with dust I would like to talk about is the sort of art that is really connected to people. We can add to this small but nevertheless illustrious gallery our own Nicolae Comanescu, the painter of Romanian disconnected realities.
What brings together such different artists such as Muniz, Cortson, Floe/Vatamanu, Zhang and Comanescu? It is the materials they used, which have the particularity of being the people's own dust and ashes. And dust, whether we like it or not, is personal and it represents us. Let me explain...
No matter if we talk of buildings or people, the dust that surrounds them is made, to a lesser or greater extent, by tiny particles that were born out of their own bodies. In the case of buildings, dust can be made of bits that come, through fiction or impact, from bricks or cement, but also brought from the outside world, carried inside by the people who pass their thresholds.
In the case of people, the dust that surrounds them – in their houses or workplaces – comes from bricks and cement too, but also from tiny pieces that come from books, shoes, clothing and so on. And, lest we forget, from dead skin and fallen hairs. So the dust from my house fully represents me bodily. And if anyone would be curious enough to analyse things under the microscope, they could say what sort of objects I have in the house, whether I like to wear cotton or silk, or whether my carpets are old, or that I have many old books and so on.
This was the general idea used by Vik Muniz in his great show from the Whitney Museum in the US (2001), and also the concept behind Allison Cortson's portraits.
Muniz, for his exhibition "The Things Themselves: Pictures of Dust" thought to use the dust gathered by Whitney Museum's cleaners for several months. Sifting through it, he then used it as some artists use paints and inks, to render shapes and forms and colours. Naturally, the effect was that of black and white photographs: regular dust is not too coloured.
Muniz, a Brazillian artists living in the US, is also known for his paintings made with jelly, jams and other unusual substances. But of this dusty experience he said: "There was dust from the first floor, which was dark and greasy. On the top floor, there was some lighter dust. It was the hardest substance I've ever worked with, because it's disgusting. Dust is pieces of hair and skin. I think people scratch their heads a lot in museums; that gets mixed with the residue from the artworks themselves. That's the ultimate bind between the museum visitor and the artwork". (from New York Times Magazine, 11 February 2001).
So there you have it: Muniz's works were a "portrait" of the museum, but also of its visitors. Read more on Vik Muniz at www.vikmuniz.net
Allison Cortson, an American artist, has a somewhat different view. Cortson, for a change, looked not for the dust of public institutions, but from that of people's personal spaces, in their flats and houses. Her naturalistic portraits of friends and acquaintances come complete with the depiction of the space they use everyday, painted with the dust of those living quarters. Such perfect portraits indeed! One can see the people, and one can search for their spirit in these depiction. But also present are the particles and molecules from those people's lives, which are derived (in part) directly from them. See some Allison Cortson works here: www.thehappylion.com/index.php
To give a further, spiritual, dimension to this short history of dust and contemporary art, we mentioned Zhang Huan. He does not work with dust per se, he works with ashes, but I do believe we must include him in this short history of artistic dust. His materials are the ashes of prayer incense sticks from the temples of Shanghai. They don't represent people as well as the dust from apartments and museums does, but coming from temples, these ashes represent people's hopes and prayers. If we would go for pompous phrases, we could even say this is a metaphor for humankind's hopes and prayers – but we won't say it, because we happen to hate metaphorical speeches. Zhang's most recent exhibition took place during October-November 2007, in London, at Haunch of Venison Gallery. Here he exhibited paintings (made with ash-paints, naturally) and sculptures made of compacted ash. The exhibition was transferred to Haunch of Venison Berlin, where the novelty is a 4-metre tall Buddha made of compacted ash. (details here: www.haunchofvenison.com/en/
This spiritual dimension of art reminds me of a work/intervention/performance by Romanian artists Mona Vatamanu and Florin Tudor, incidentally former colleagues of Nicolae in the Rostopasca art group that made the Romanian art headlines in the 1998-2000 period.
The Schitul Maicilor church in Bucharest is a building which, in 1982, was put on tracks and literally moved some 200 metres further down the road to make room for blocks of flats. In 2006, Mona and Florin went to the present-day location of the church, picked up pocketfuls of dust and transported them back to the original location of the church. Thus, symbolically but also physically, the old church found its old place. We could say that the artists have made, through this intervention, a historical reparation for the demolition of a large chunk of old Bucharest that made room for Ceausescu's People's House, the present-day Palace of Parliament. More on Mona and Florin at www.monavatamanuflorintudor.ro
And now we can start speaking about our friend Nicolae Comanescu, the painter whose brand new project you are about to see.
Ever since I met him, Nicolae was up for a laugh, and always ready to give a kick in the Establishment's behind. Working together with his mates from Rostopasca, Nicolae did exactly these: he had fun, he poked fun at the pretensions of the Romanian contemporary art scene, and – very importantly – he provoked into action the dozy young artists of the day. Or maybe those were the times when young artists didn't do much, anyway.
Gone are the days when Nicolae would kill, together with his fellow Rostopascians, the category of "nice", and would play tapes with long rants about all and sundry (which were probably fuelled by alcohol). Mr Comanescu has grown up to be a painter, and a pretty good one, too. A painter with an eye for the quirks of Bucharest's urban life (and God knows there are so many of them!), and with a healthy sense of humour. His new works from "Dust 2.0" series continue the line of reasoning observed in the "Wrong Paintings", "Grand Prix Remix, and "Beach Culture in Bercsenyi".
In those series, the world is seen from the perspective of a big bag of candies (different tastes, different colours, all mixed-up), or of a generator of randomness: limousines, sexy girls in skimpy outfits, sea-battles, trucks, dogs, blocks of flats... This all might seem unconnected, but they all belong to the same reality of media hyperactivity that results in a deluge of visual information hitting us square on our heads.
Underneath the anarchic facade of wild colours and cars and bodies, the attentive viewer can see that our friend Nicolae is preoccupied by serious problems, such as the strange alienation which many dwellers of urban conglomerates suffer from. Or at least that's what I read in those paintings. You may read what you want, I won't stop you.
The "Dust 2.0" series goes one step further in showing us the darker, even more serious side of Nicolae Comanescu, and this is more than likely aided by restricting the chromatics to various shades of dust. But we have to observe another preoccupation in the artist's mid. These new works depicting the neighbourhood of Berceni literally convey the life of the artist, and I would make so bold as to compare them to Utrillo's Montmartre paintings. What we see is the artist's immediate environment, the places where he spends a great deal of his time, and where some of inspiration comes from.
And they are true portraits of Berceni, too, due to the fact that these works are painted with the native dust of this dusty neighbourhood of Romania's dusty capital. If there ever was a thing that lasted well longer than anything else, then that thing would be Bucharest's dust. And well after all of Bucharest will have fallen into ruin (God willing in a very distant future), there will still be the dust to testify for this great city, just as the dust of a carted-off church went to cry over its former earthly location, as a witness of its former self.
Nicolae Comanescu's Berceni is the very real Berceni you can reach by taking the Magistrala 2 Metro line to Piata Sudului, or the famous tram 34 from Gara de Nord (I would not advise this route because it would take ages to get there). The blocks of flats might look just the same as countless other buildings raised by the former leaders of Romania's recent communist past, but their images set in dust by Nicolae are different.
They are different because the dust they are painted with their own dust, coming from their bricks and mortar and peeling paint, and from adjoining dust-laden streets, alleyways and lawns. The metaphysical sadness of the mostly unloved block of flats comes through its image more than it would show in a photograph. While the photo preserves the (semi)perfect likeness of the building, the image is made by the impression of light on photo-sensible material. And light is always clean. Comanescu's dust paintings are made from primordial matter, from what can be turned to sludge and mud with as little as a light shower.
The paintings in the "Dust 2.0" series have left a mark on my consciousness as indelible as the spots left on my light-grey jeans after hurrying through Bucharest's streets on foot, on a Spring/Autumn/Winter day. If you haven't had this experience, you will not understand me completely. I suggest you go for yourselves on a little walk on any given pavement in Bucharest, in rainy weather. For best results, try a neighbourhood street (although the fully central Piata Rosseti might do just as well), and make it late-Autumn/Winter.
But enough about dust on shoes and trousers. What I would really love to do is to talk more about dust on paintings, or better still, about paintings with dust. I think that Nicolae is the first Romanian artist to treat this underrated medium with the respect it deserves. One of the basest things in life, dirt, has been elevated to the rank of artistic endeavour. The metaphor-lover would go on to say that by this act, the artist has emphasised the transitoriness of life, and that all we are is dust in the wind and from dust we come and to dust we shall return, or even that life is dirt.
But I say no, this time the artist does not propose metaphors, or other meta-meanings. My opinion is that Nicolae has decided to give a voice to his environment, to make his part of Bucharest talk for itself, loud and clear. What can be more direct than the voice of stones and bricks and dust and dirt, if you want to hear the story of a place? (And no, this is not a metaphor).
Let's leave metaphors aside for the time being, and trust what we see, because what we now see is what we get if we go to Berceni tonight (and what we get on our trousers if we walk there in wet weather).
You probably got tired of me by now. I should end it here, but not before I will heap some more praise upon Nicolae Comanescu: the man, the artist, the thinker of genius, the embodiment of the best qualities of the Romanian people, one of the brightest stars in the constellation of leading men and women to have come from the city of Ploiesti.
Enjoy these images, and please try to think about them in the light of my little text. You will then see that this project truly represents Comanescu as a mature artist, as an artist whose humour and insight into life, translated into the language of art, do not need to employ the great array of artifice available to contemporary artists.
Nicolae does not want to con us into believing some well rehearsed theory of art, I am sure of it. He wants us to witness life as it is in his corner of world called Berceni, Sector 4, Bucuresti, Romania.
Mihai Risnoveanu
Art seems to employ a myriad of textures and materials – and even no materials at all – in order to express itself. Yet there is something which has been used from the very start of this thing called art, when our cave-dwelling ancestors began leaving their spiritual mark on this world. I am talking about dust, about dirt, earth, humus. The Neolithic "artist" imprinted his thought firstly and foremost by using charcoal and various types of dust, preferably of the reddish variety. The results are stunning even nowadays, after millennia and millennia. And they are born out of one of the most elemental materials available to humankind, something that just lies around in every corner and, indeed, everywhere one cares to look.
Dust in itself is not very versatile, and surely our ancestors noted this. The results of this observation is that they mixed it with animal fat to make stick around for longer. I should say that ten thousand years is a pretty long period of time, and I wish many other art pieces would last even hundred times less. But you see, they don't build things this durable these days, isn't it?
But we are not here to talk about how long things last, but about how things are made, and what are they made of. Making art by using dust is, as we all know, nothing new. Apart from cave paintings, dust (or rather special pigments from special soils) has been used in paints from the ancient Egyptians onwards, by peoples from all the corners of the world. We are going to jump over millennia, then, and look at the use of proper dust while creating works of contemporary art. We are not speaking of tempera, oil colours or gouaches made with ground-based pigments, but dust-dust, the kind that gets on your clothing when you take a fall outside, that sticks to your shoes, and is swept by street sweepers with their big brooms and mechanised aspirators and other cleaning implements.
There are several contemporary artists who have left their mark in dust in recent times: I will only mention Vik Muniz, Allison Cortson, Mona Vatamanu and Florin Tudor, Zhang Huan. We could also add to the count the great Antoni Tapies and several exponents of Arte Povera, but that would bring another dimension to this discussion. The art with dust I would like to talk about is the sort of art that is really connected to people. We can add to this small but nevertheless illustrious gallery our own Nicolae Comanescu, the painter of Romanian disconnected realities.
What brings together such different artists such as Muniz, Cortson, Floe/Vatamanu, Zhang and Comanescu? It is the materials they used, which have the particularity of being the people's own dust and ashes. And dust, whether we like it or not, is personal and it represents us. Let me explain...
No matter if we talk of buildings or people, the dust that surrounds them is made, to a lesser or greater extent, by tiny particles that were born out of their own bodies. In the case of buildings, dust can be made of bits that come, through fiction or impact, from bricks or cement, but also brought from the outside world, carried inside by the people who pass their thresholds.
In the case of people, the dust that surrounds them – in their houses or workplaces – comes from bricks and cement too, but also from tiny pieces that come from books, shoes, clothing and so on. And, lest we forget, from dead skin and fallen hairs. So the dust from my house fully represents me bodily. And if anyone would be curious enough to analyse things under the microscope, they could say what sort of objects I have in the house, whether I like to wear cotton or silk, or whether my carpets are old, or that I have many old books and so on.
This was the general idea used by Vik Muniz in his great show from the Whitney Museum in the US (2001), and also the concept behind Allison Cortson's portraits.
Muniz, for his exhibition "The Things Themselves: Pictures of Dust" thought to use the dust gathered by Whitney Museum's cleaners for several months. Sifting through it, he then used it as some artists use paints and inks, to render shapes and forms and colours. Naturally, the effect was that of black and white photographs: regular dust is not too coloured.
Muniz, a Brazillian artists living in the US, is also known for his paintings made with jelly, jams and other unusual substances. But of this dusty experience he said: "There was dust from the first floor, which was dark and greasy. On the top floor, there was some lighter dust. It was the hardest substance I've ever worked with, because it's disgusting. Dust is pieces of hair and skin. I think people scratch their heads a lot in museums; that gets mixed with the residue from the artworks themselves. That's the ultimate bind between the museum visitor and the artwork". (from New York Times Magazine, 11 February 2001).
So there you have it: Muniz's works were a "portrait" of the museum, but also of its visitors. Read more on Vik Muniz at www.vikmuniz.net
Allison Cortson, an American artist, has a somewhat different view. Cortson, for a change, looked not for the dust of public institutions, but from that of people's personal spaces, in their flats and houses. Her naturalistic portraits of friends and acquaintances come complete with the depiction of the space they use everyday, painted with the dust of those living quarters. Such perfect portraits indeed! One can see the people, and one can search for their spirit in these depiction. But also present are the particles and molecules from those people's lives, which are derived (in part) directly from them. See some Allison Cortson works here: www.thehappylion.com/index.php
To give a further, spiritual, dimension to this short history of dust and contemporary art, we mentioned Zhang Huan. He does not work with dust per se, he works with ashes, but I do believe we must include him in this short history of artistic dust. His materials are the ashes of prayer incense sticks from the temples of Shanghai. They don't represent people as well as the dust from apartments and museums does, but coming from temples, these ashes represent people's hopes and prayers. If we would go for pompous phrases, we could even say this is a metaphor for humankind's hopes and prayers – but we won't say it, because we happen to hate metaphorical speeches. Zhang's most recent exhibition took place during October-November 2007, in London, at Haunch of Venison Gallery. Here he exhibited paintings (made with ash-paints, naturally) and sculptures made of compacted ash. The exhibition was transferred to Haunch of Venison Berlin, where the novelty is a 4-metre tall Buddha made of compacted ash. (details here: www.haunchofvenison.com/en/
This spiritual dimension of art reminds me of a work/intervention/performance by Romanian artists Mona Vatamanu and Florin Tudor, incidentally former colleagues of Nicolae in the Rostopasca art group that made the Romanian art headlines in the 1998-2000 period.
The Schitul Maicilor church in Bucharest is a building which, in 1982, was put on tracks and literally moved some 200 metres further down the road to make room for blocks of flats. In 2006, Mona and Florin went to the present-day location of the church, picked up pocketfuls of dust and transported them back to the original location of the church. Thus, symbolically but also physically, the old church found its old place. We could say that the artists have made, through this intervention, a historical reparation for the demolition of a large chunk of old Bucharest that made room for Ceausescu's People's House, the present-day Palace of Parliament. More on Mona and Florin at www.monavatamanuflorintudor.ro
And now we can start speaking about our friend Nicolae Comanescu, the painter whose brand new project you are about to see.
Ever since I met him, Nicolae was up for a laugh, and always ready to give a kick in the Establishment's behind. Working together with his mates from Rostopasca, Nicolae did exactly these: he had fun, he poked fun at the pretensions of the Romanian contemporary art scene, and – very importantly – he provoked into action the dozy young artists of the day. Or maybe those were the times when young artists didn't do much, anyway.
Gone are the days when Nicolae would kill, together with his fellow Rostopascians, the category of "nice", and would play tapes with long rants about all and sundry (which were probably fuelled by alcohol). Mr Comanescu has grown up to be a painter, and a pretty good one, too. A painter with an eye for the quirks of Bucharest's urban life (and God knows there are so many of them!), and with a healthy sense of humour. His new works from "Dust 2.0" series continue the line of reasoning observed in the "Wrong Paintings", "Grand Prix Remix, and "Beach Culture in Bercsenyi".
In those series, the world is seen from the perspective of a big bag of candies (different tastes, different colours, all mixed-up), or of a generator of randomness: limousines, sexy girls in skimpy outfits, sea-battles, trucks, dogs, blocks of flats... This all might seem unconnected, but they all belong to the same reality of media hyperactivity that results in a deluge of visual information hitting us square on our heads.
Underneath the anarchic facade of wild colours and cars and bodies, the attentive viewer can see that our friend Nicolae is preoccupied by serious problems, such as the strange alienation which many dwellers of urban conglomerates suffer from. Or at least that's what I read in those paintings. You may read what you want, I won't stop you.
The "Dust 2.0" series goes one step further in showing us the darker, even more serious side of Nicolae Comanescu, and this is more than likely aided by restricting the chromatics to various shades of dust. But we have to observe another preoccupation in the artist's mid. These new works depicting the neighbourhood of Berceni literally convey the life of the artist, and I would make so bold as to compare them to Utrillo's Montmartre paintings. What we see is the artist's immediate environment, the places where he spends a great deal of his time, and where some of inspiration comes from.
And they are true portraits of Berceni, too, due to the fact that these works are painted with the native dust of this dusty neighbourhood of Romania's dusty capital. If there ever was a thing that lasted well longer than anything else, then that thing would be Bucharest's dust. And well after all of Bucharest will have fallen into ruin (God willing in a very distant future), there will still be the dust to testify for this great city, just as the dust of a carted-off church went to cry over its former earthly location, as a witness of its former self.
Nicolae Comanescu's Berceni is the very real Berceni you can reach by taking the Magistrala 2 Metro line to Piata Sudului, or the famous tram 34 from Gara de Nord (I would not advise this route because it would take ages to get there). The blocks of flats might look just the same as countless other buildings raised by the former leaders of Romania's recent communist past, but their images set in dust by Nicolae are different.
They are different because the dust they are painted with their own dust, coming from their bricks and mortar and peeling paint, and from adjoining dust-laden streets, alleyways and lawns. The metaphysical sadness of the mostly unloved block of flats comes through its image more than it would show in a photograph. While the photo preserves the (semi)perfect likeness of the building, the image is made by the impression of light on photo-sensible material. And light is always clean. Comanescu's dust paintings are made from primordial matter, from what can be turned to sludge and mud with as little as a light shower.
The paintings in the "Dust 2.0" series have left a mark on my consciousness as indelible as the spots left on my light-grey jeans after hurrying through Bucharest's streets on foot, on a Spring/Autumn/Winter day. If you haven't had this experience, you will not understand me completely. I suggest you go for yourselves on a little walk on any given pavement in Bucharest, in rainy weather. For best results, try a neighbourhood street (although the fully central Piata Rosseti might do just as well), and make it late-Autumn/Winter.
But enough about dust on shoes and trousers. What I would really love to do is to talk more about dust on paintings, or better still, about paintings with dust. I think that Nicolae is the first Romanian artist to treat this underrated medium with the respect it deserves. One of the basest things in life, dirt, has been elevated to the rank of artistic endeavour. The metaphor-lover would go on to say that by this act, the artist has emphasised the transitoriness of life, and that all we are is dust in the wind and from dust we come and to dust we shall return, or even that life is dirt.
But I say no, this time the artist does not propose metaphors, or other meta-meanings. My opinion is that Nicolae has decided to give a voice to his environment, to make his part of Bucharest talk for itself, loud and clear. What can be more direct than the voice of stones and bricks and dust and dirt, if you want to hear the story of a place? (And no, this is not a metaphor).
Let's leave metaphors aside for the time being, and trust what we see, because what we now see is what we get if we go to Berceni tonight (and what we get on our trousers if we walk there in wet weather).
You probably got tired of me by now. I should end it here, but not before I will heap some more praise upon Nicolae Comanescu: the man, the artist, the thinker of genius, the embodiment of the best qualities of the Romanian people, one of the brightest stars in the constellation of leading men and women to have come from the city of Ploiesti.
Enjoy these images, and please try to think about them in the light of my little text. You will then see that this project truly represents Comanescu as a mature artist, as an artist whose humour and insight into life, translated into the language of art, do not need to employ the great array of artifice available to contemporary artists.
Nicolae does not want to con us into believing some well rehearsed theory of art, I am sure of it. He wants us to witness life as it is in his corner of world called Berceni, Sector 4, Bucuresti, Romania.
Mihai Risnoveanu
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