Istituto Tommaseo, Trieste,
Curator: Ruxandra Balaci
NICOLAE
COMANESCU – NOFOCUS/ DEMO
by
RUXANDRA BALACI (catalog text)
NICOLAE COMANESCU
(ex-Rostopasca group 1), now
tura_org., tura_bar and nofocus.org) was born in 1968 (RO). Working in Bucharest, he is, at the
moment, one of the most active Romanian artists, strongly involved in many
projects all spinning around the multi-stratified concepts of NoFOCUS &
Parasite.
Intended as an open-ended
project including a multiplicity of layers within one conceptual frame, NOFOCUS
means images blurred out to create new realities with little or no connection
to the departure point, thus subject to plenty of interpretations.
NoFOCUS-Demo, presented in Trieste Contemporanea
gallery– includes a video and large size prints video stills-like.
The continuous reality
registered by the video image is permanently blurred by applying the Photoshop
filter named ‘pixelate mosaic’. The device is currently used on TV
News programs to ceil one’s identity during a dramatic event. Or to ceil
the film or computer game one intends to sell, in that case you are entitled
only to view the DEMO part before buying it.
If one doesn’t buy
the DEMO, he obtains ‘only’ highly poetical images and
sometimes…another reality.
Thus it is suggested that
the overspread of visual information (an inflation due to the continuous
broadcasting of media) becomes – in overdose – lack of
information/cancellation of it – total dilution of content and change it
into a stream of the undefined…
Being No-focused is a way
of parasiting (with the raster graphic low resolution) the initial, mimetic
high resolution display.
The artist acts as a
videocam - invoking also the faked glamour of surveillance- entering the forms,
altering pre-existent realities. Supplying delusions and creating illusions. In
this order the viewer is an accessory, unable to assert control.
Manipulation is explicitly
exhibited on its largest scale, as key concept of nowadays civilization, as
unit of fallacious surface, as dissolution of certainty. From –accepted-
illusion to total immersion into it, video and computer art are merging,
suggesting that everything could be captured by cameras/monitors/screens and
URL-s.
Suggesting also the
discrepancy between the fictitious world of the media and its pretence of
objectivity. And finally that media reproductions aren’t necessarily
depicting reality.
Deleting or changing
information is somehow demonstrating that updating could be useless in the
overflowing stream of data…but also that the uncontrolled becomes
controlled.
By blurring information
and shape, the immediacy and banality of current life registered on film or
snapshot is totally transformed into abstract or/and unknown.
Proximal meaning becomes
distal abstraction…allowing for plenty of connotations…
Fuzziness is obsessively
exploited also in the Nofocus- Snapshots series which consist of blurred gros plans
– acting as anticoagulant of the real images, rendering them fluid, a
continuous flowing of infos into forms. Simultaneously appearing and dissolving
belonging ultimately to the XL area of art pervaded by light-emphasized in the
last and a half Century - from Lanterna Magica to holograms, pixels and VR.
Finally retaining only light-sensitiveness of the eye…
(see also www.nofocus.org site, whose homepage like a
LED running script, invokes a plurality of choices. Even if we think we can
identify what’s about in the image we often only hint at a
possible interpretation.)
To parasite the image/ to
parasite reality is echoed by extension in other Comanescu’s projects.
His tura_bar art magazine parasites other art
magazines…
Parasite 2) is about depending on others (the host),
parasite is subverting the others, parasite could be also about infecting the
others with ideas and forms, in the case of tura_bar with underground content
and atmosphere. In the trend of stating Underground and Hacker scene as new
avantgarde - tura –bar renders fuzzy to disappearance (in a playful
manner) the Art/Anti-art borders.
A kind of mobile unit,
dynamically interchanging hosts, proposing items of minor culture wanting to
become major, major infested with minor, peripheral infesting global and of
course global canceling peripheral. In this venue, Japan and Latin America are
also, peripheral to Europocentrism, as Eastern Europe still is, and by creating
intello connections between Bucharest/ Tokyo/ NY/ London/ Belgrade/
Recife…etc., the obsession to enter the center is thus…also
blurred…unifying the undergrounds without prejudices or complexes.
Fashionable and devoted to the ephemeral-underground’s ubiquity blur also
cultural establishment and serious critique transforming them in subversive
comments, humorous comics, nonchalant net-dialogue.
1)Rostopasca was a group of young Romanian artists: Floe
Tudor, Nicolae Comanescu, Alina Pentac, Mona Vatamanu, Alina Buga, Angela
Bontas and Gorzo, active between 1998-2001.
Both funny and stressing, they hit up Bucharestís boring art
scene with spontaneous, surprising, even shocking interventions. They made all
the time jokes and little scandals (as intelligent strategy).
No national specific stuff in their works, as they
were the first Romanian generation to have no real connection with the ancient
communist regime, the first to live since their teen age with mobile phones,
computers, walkmans and MTV.
Dealing with hard-edged problems of contemporary life (not
strongly polemical as the previous generation - Perjovschi or subREAL- used to
be) but derisive in a most nonchalant way, they playfully deconstructed
everything, humorously contesting everything, assuming underground subversive
roles.
.
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