No. 30 / June 2020
Mihai Plămădeală, art critic – article published in Observator Cultural magazine, no. 619 / 2012
One of those exhibitions that the viewer will certainly not forget for the rest of his life is Tronicart 1300, by Gheorghe Ilea, organized by the National Museum of Contemporary Art Bucharest and Plan B Gallery (Cluj-Napoca) at Sala Dalles (Bucharest), during March – April 2012.
At a strictly descriptive level, the project brings together 56 paintings made on as many Dacia 1300 car hoods, whose iconography is provided by the communist history of Romania. Beyond the originality elevated to the rank of ingenuity through the means of art, it captures the double perspective, subjective and objective, with which the artist operates simultaneously. The two visions coexist harmoniously, in a stable balance of playfulness. Not at all frightened, the subjects of the “hoods” do not miss any defining aspect of the period they describe. However, the stakes are not descriptive. The great license is the right distance and the sense of measure in dealing with the subject. In Gheorghe Ilea’s lexicon of signs, the framing, the colors, the iconic or the choice of the representative moment of the approached narrative chapters, play the main role.
The impact force of the images is stronger than that of a possible entire archive of the main news journal of the so-called golden age. The interference of the great history with the subjective vision of the passed period, brings into discourse that human side which in principle escapes voluntarily or deliberately the creators of the past. The family photo, the postcard, the comic book magazine, the icon or the famous label, once the most (re) known, Made in China, parade on the hoods once produced in Pitesti, after a Renault license.
The representations subtly avoid the exclusivity of the political subject and at the same time free themselves from the geometric “tyranny” of the supports. Related to the latter aspect, I further propose, for the extension of the analysis, some somewhat morphologically similar landmarks. Bruno di Marino, together with his colleagues from the creative group Studio Azzuro, artistically proposed the (kinetic) image without frame, by transforming the three-dimensional space into a support for projections. Nam June Paik also tried to “abolish” the tyranny of monitors, by investing them with visual function in his installations, but also by appealing to other limits of the framework, than those of the devices. Finally, keeping all the relationships of environment, time, distance and orientation, Dan Palade, through his recent project, “Workbook”, used unconventional materials for painting, especially tin that once covered a communist industrial mastodon and became a support for his artistic representations.
Returning to Gheorghe Ilea, for him the Dacia hoods become diary pages. The framing solutions sometimes involve the inscription of geometric shapes in that of the ready made object, other times its treatment as a three-dimensional support or even as a window to the represented subject. We must not ignore the fact that between the idea and its materialization we are dealing with a quality that transcends persuasion: artistic value. Painting scenes from the construction on a culture club does not automatically equate to an artistic act. Fortunately, there are no recipes in this area. At least no one can boast of sure ingredients of success. I note that the artist is consistent with himself, in terms of creativity and that Bucharest is not the only way to develop and access the “good world” of the arts. Sometimes, the road to the West is shorter from Cluj, Timișoara or Iași. In terms of internal resources, even though artist Cai Guo-Quiang suspended no less than nine Chevrolets (real and functional) in the atrium of the Guggenheim Museum in New York four years ago (2008), I think that piloting a Dacia 1300, on the right route can also get you to a large biennial or a large museum.