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MARIETA CHIRULESCU
Stop, 2010. Courtesy of the artist and galery Micky Schubert,
Berlin.
RENé DANIëLS
René Daniëls's meteoric career took place for the
most part between 1977 and 1987, coinciding with the
time when the Neo-expressionist movement came to
dominate the art market. In 1987 Daniëls was affected
by a brain haemorrhage and did not paint again until
2006. In 1984 an invasive pattern emerged. It was a
perspective space with two or three walls, usually
without floor or ceiling. This enigmatic, ambivalent
shape often took the form of a bow tie – it is worn by
the artist in a drawing entitled A Room above the
Pacific; it is a pictogram satirising the bourgeois
atmosphere of exhibition openings; but in Battle
for the Twentieth Century, the scarlet bow tie is
pierced with yellow openings – windows, or perhaps
monochrome paintings, which transform the bow
tie into an exhibition space. It is an alluring mise en
abyme: from the painting in the exhibition space to
the exhibition within the space of the painting. At that
same time, the British artists Michael Baldwin and
Mel Ramsden from Art & Language created a similarly
depopulated embedding of concepts in their series
Incidents in a Museum. Daniëls's diptych Title Evening
sabotages perspective in a similar kind of way. His
target is once again the fiction of the painting and its
exhibition, the vacuity of too focused and abstracted
a view.
H. M. tr. J.H.
Born in 1950 in Eindhoven (Netherlands), where he
lives and works.
Les Prairies's artists
Marieta Chirulescu has managed to escape the usual schism that
divides the digital sect from the sacrosanct chapel of traditional
photography. Her pictorial ecumenicalism embraces digital
and analogue, painting and photography, Photoshop and the
photocopier. Her works, which can be likened to filters or veils
or colour projections, often have the effect of a nebulous mist
whose depth rises above the surface and whose borders are
unclear. It can be difficult to make out the grain because the effect
of digital enlargement is so similar to the weave of a painted
canvas. It is also hard to differentiate between the margins and
the edges. They are superimposed in a stratigraphy that defies
interpretation. Chirulescu's taste for interference – a forgotten
scrap of scotch tape here, a scratch there, dust, reflections,
misalignment, and so on – is perhaps a product of her Romanian
childhood, spent reading badly printed books. Images from
the internet, screenshots, photos taken by her father during the
dictatorship, and illustrations from the old Romanian journal Arte
have all been treated in a way that apes the style of archival and
bureaucratic processes. Chirulescu apparently works towards an
exhaustiveness which would explain the washed out, overexposed
tones of anaemic images. Her use of layering software is done
to achieve impalpable tactile effects – the aim is to remove the
presence not the virtual nature of the image.
H. M. tr. J.H.
Born in 1974 in Sibiu (Romania), lives and works in Berlin
(Germany).
Painting on the Bullfight, 1985. Courtesy Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht.
Photography : Peter Cox. © Adagp, Paris 2012.
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