No.6 / June 2019
Mihai Plămădeală, art critic – essay from the book A Journey in the Painting of the 90’s: Then &Now, Ed. Sigma, Bucharest, 2010
A dialog with Roman Tolici is always a joy to the spirit comparable, if I may say, similar to the contemplation of his artworks. The coffee I had with him in an empty coffee shop on Hristo Botev Street, Bucharest, on a Saturday, got me thinking, of another situation I experienced sometime / somewhere in Montmartre, Paris. Together with Tolici, any place could feel like a cultural capital of the world (if there aren’t too many people around).
Next, I resume the interview, without my questions, but with the information I needed for my book.
“I was educated in the Special Boarding School of Fine Arts from Chişinău, that today is named after Igor Vieru. Back in those days, there were only seven schools of this kind in the Soviet Union, with such a precise organized system. They insisted on academical techniques and profound education. Already in the middle school we worked nudes, oil on canvas techniques; we benefited also from the closeness to other cultural environments: music, dance, film.

In 1990 I came to Bucharest, at the Tonitza High School, through a system of grants between the Ministries of Education from Romania and from the ex-Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic. The differences were overwhelming. I carried on feeling these differences later on, at the faculty, that I also attended in Bucharest. The thing that mostly caught my attention was the reluctance towards the academic study in the Romanian art school, probably nourished by a certain superiority. In Chişinău we were also shown albums with Picasso and Kandisky and modernism was never refused, but in school one had to learn the handicraft – however small and inartistically this may sound. In Romania, the accent was placed on the artistic lifestyle and the craft was neglected, even despised, it seemed to me.
The communists from Romania and from the other shore of the Prut have enforced a politicized education. The change of the system brought again in front of everyone a range of prohibited subjects. Slowly, we got from heroic subjects, which by the way I was performing gladly, to the longtime wished free theme. The Gospel According to Santa Clause (2006) is one of the series in which I put in discussion the way our consumerist contemporary society regards religion, but also the position of the Church towards this approach. The modern man does not remember the real meaning of the traditions and practices he keeps. And the communists managed to convince me of one thing only: that even in the case of the religion, something is rotten.
After having graduated, I had around two years of searches, after which I returned to the origins. In what I’m doing, I prefer to let the viewer discover for himself what is behind the images I create, rather than reveal to him everything ready made. I work following my ideas and I start from the premise that if I have good paintings, the exhibitions will come, so I was never forced to paint on an order or under the pressure of a deadline. The personal exhibition from the National Museum of Contemporary Art was, for example, a step made from both sides.
Lately I have dealt a lot with photography, that plays the role of my sketch book. I take pictures, I select some of them and than I use it as a starting point for my paintings, trying to avoid the extravagant and to concentrate on the archetype. I try to transform the snapshot into an iconic image. I think that everything that surrounds us is filled with beauty, a beauty that we just have to notice.”


