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Raluca Arnăutu: Phantasmagoria

No. 36 / September 2020

Mihai Plămădeală, art critic – article published in Observator Cultural magazine, no.714 / 2014

 

The exhibition “Phantasmagoria” (2014), signed by Raluca Arnăutu and organized by Anaid Art Gallery, brought together forty artworks made in a span of two years. What caught my attention was the theme that the artist had announced since 2012 through an exhibition, “Zoolandia”, hosted by the same gallery.

The chosen theme is outside of global trends of the last decade. If at international level the post-postmodernist spirit prevails, based on configuration and reconfiguration, in Romania the new figurative wave and experimentalism seem to play the lead role, at least among the young generation. Raluca Arnăutu goes on her own path, one of imagination, situated on the border with the dreamer.

 

Raluca Arnăutu (1)

 

Among the Romanian artists who approached this iconographic area after the 2000s, each with its own means and finality, I remember Cătălin Burcea, with the exhibition “Innosins” and Roman Tolici with “Sweet Nightmares”. In relation to the cited artists, Raluca is positioned at a safe distance from the nightmare. Her creatures do not automatically belong to darkness or fable, but rather come from the realm of fairy tales and fantasy prose. These creatures, says the curator of the exhibition, Diana Dochia, “haunts the world long and wide trying to find a place where they can live in peace. The dealing of images is almost never constructed in a simple, passive description, but expresses an attitude, a polemics towards reality or at least a question mark towards the notion of real, thus creating an alternative, parallel universe.”

 

Raluca Arnăutu (2)

 

The wolf, the dragon, the eagle, the bear, the fish or the cat, I would add, are really expressed by shape, color and texture, not by the meanings we can attach to them or in the context of the representation. The distinction between dream and reality is suppressed by morphology, by purely graphic means. Starting from the fact that all the characters are integrated in plausible, extremely real spaces, we notice that the potential difference between real and imaginary is not doubled by tension. It all starts and ends in the realm of graphics. The viewer will never forget that he is in front of some drawings and will not dive, as such, into the revealed world. What really matters is the relationship between the line and the shape obtained.

In a discussion with the artist, she told me that her sources of inspiration are drawn on one hand from some books such as Boris Vian’s “The Foam of Days”, Mikhail Bulgakov’s “Master and Margaret” or Jerome K. Jerome’s “The Dancing Partner”, on the other hand from the creation of Victor Brauner, Max Ernst and Marcel Duchamp. “It is interesting – said Raluca Arnăutu – that I graduated from the Faculty of Graphics, then I went through the textile and photography area, to return to drawing. That doesn’t mean I’ll stay here – I’m just going through an intermediate phase.

 

Raluca Arnăutu (3)

 

The exhibition Phantasmagoria represents me, but at present I am much more attracted to the textile sculpture or the object installation. But I feel good on any of these lands. Initially we did not plan such an exhibition; we simply started by developing themes such as that of the dragon, the wolf with seven heads and so on, respectively by putting these characters on two-dimensional support, in aberrant contexts.”

Raluca’s graphic approach is similar to the one in which she conceives her sculptures. They contain totally different materials, the artist combining, for example, light, fine elements with heavy replicas, such as lace and iron, which seem unattainable, but which finally find their harmonious conjunction. I conclude, in agreement with the curator’s opinion, that “Phantasmagoria” can be placed, metaphorically, between Victor Brauner or Gellu Naum.

Whether it’s a textile sculpture or an installation, Raluca’s objects, always fantastic characters and animals, are large. This time the artist traveled the path from sculpture to a small drawing, a path that she herself sees somehow in reverse, at least in relation to the so-called standard procedure. But logic and conceptual reasoning are broader truths than statistics of any kind. In addition to her artistic activity, Raluca Arnăutu is a restorer at the National Museum of Art of Romania. The two types of activity, although related, but still distinct, determine unique solutions and routes. One of them is precisely the exhibition “Phantasmagoria”.

Raluca Arnăutu (4)

 

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