No. 17 / December 2019
Mihai Plămădeală, art critic – article published in Observator Cultural magazine, no.671 / 26th of April 2013
Between 2nd and 20th of April, 2013, Art Yourself Gallery hosted Dragoş Pătraşcu’s solo exhibition of graphics and installation art, “Notes About Line / The Dark Face of the Moon”. The University Professor from Iași returns to Bucharest after the masterful exhibition held in 2011 at the Romanian Cultural Institute, with the same “notes”, I would say, not only about line (and point), but about the very spirit of representation through drawing and volume. The main characteristics of the artist are imagination and refinement, fused in a discourse that is based on intellectual reasons. Following a metaphorically synoptic logic, the geometric place of his non-visceral is inscribed on a possible axis drawn between Albrecht Dürer and Jorge Luis Borges.
Even if the majority of artworks coincides with that of the event organized two years ago, also a retrospective one, the exhibition from Art Yourself is a new one, by the way it was conceived. The play between drawing and object, between graphic relations and readymade assembly is extended this time through the relations between light and volume. The counter-day placement of some pieces, determined by the adaptation to space, I mean the occupation of the windowed sides of the rooms, lets the artifacts live. Moreover, the optical effects prove to be so strong that they can be considered as viable exposure solutions.
The title “The Dark Face of the Moon”, apart from defining a state of things related to what can be seen and what is not physically seen in the proposed installations, is, if not borrowed, at least similar to that of the well-known album produced in 1973 by Pink Floyd. Beyond the fact that musical instruments play a major role in the installations we are referring to, the title of an artwork, “Letter to John Lennon”, makes me to believe that the name of the exhibition was chosen in relation to the British progressive & psychedelic band.
Musical instruments have interesting physical forms, dictated by functionality, respectively acoustic properties, tuning mechanisms or controlled sound production. The level of interest in them is also related to the knowledge of their specific music. The use of musical instruments in sculpture, assembly, possibly as readymade, offers certain advantages, but is at the same time dangerous. The risk would be that the artwork would be redundant or sufficient within itself.
Among the artists who use the “musical potential,” my thoughts turn to the Canadian Douglas Walker, whose kinetic garden sculptures involve the assembly of recycled instruments, most of them from the brass family. The humorous, or at least anecdotal side is implicit in this case. Sculptor Bruce Gray also has a number of distorted musical instruments. His interventions send to the area of cubism, the drums being unfolded into rectangles, the caps cut and flattened and the mechanisms dismantled and assembled according to criteria that evade mechanics, in the name of formal continuity.
Dragoş Pătraşcu’s instruments are not prepared in the sense of the ideas of Fluxus & George Maciunas, nor do they unfold in the manner of Georges Braque, but rather are touched by the spirit of Marcel Duchamp. In the creation of the contemporary Romanian artist, the candor of Boris Vian is opposed to the Italian futuristic onomatopoeic artillery of Russolo & Balla, if the reader remembers the piano cocktail imagined by the French writer. Finally, saxophone-woman metamorphoses bring us to surrealism. Dragoş Pătraşcu is attracted, in his 3D creation, more by mechanism than by music or fable. The instrument can be a support for interventions, active or passive part in an installation or form carrying an extra-functional meaning. The artist is interested in the relationship between the whole and the part. Marking sexuality through the mannequin-tool assembly is the most direct route used by him. The alternation with the graphic artworks balances the discourse, bringing the whole exhibition in the sphere of deductible, not displayed, ideas, even if they have an aesthetic sense.
If I take into account, along with the musical instruments, Dragoş Pătraşcu’s “The Good Engine” or the “Technical Invasion”, I can’t avoid the parallel with Tom Every, whose park of metal assemblies in Wisconsin surpasses any imagination. Even if the artworks of the Romanian artist appear as points next to Every’s “320-ton Forevertron”, the artistic intentionality is somehow convergent.
I have insisted on the installation, the confluence between sculpture and musical instruments, the way of exhibition and some possible analogies due to the fact that about the same body of artworks pertinently expressed several art critics during the 2011 exhibition. The idea I want to emphasize is that the same exhibition can and must always be different, depending on the context in which it is organized. Dragoş Pătraşcu is an artist whose visibility share in Romania is currently below its value level, a level of excellence.