Pokemon and Fin de siècle

No matter how tempting, the famous recipe of making art critique according to the suggestion of Eugenio d’Ors’ seems to be, if not frail, then at least inoperative, in the circumstances of the postmodern present, so tensed as to induce a crisis. The silence in front of the work, the absent-minded look, the moving off and the coming back, the documentation and only ultimately the expression of the appraisal are not enough anymore: one needs an interpretation grid or more complex perspective, with footnotes and references to the art of an entire century, even if one is facing a young artist as Bogdan Mateias, who has only begun to shape himself. We are speaking about o student of the Art University of Bucharest (mural painting class, coordinated by professor Marilena Preda Sanc), with a surprisingly developed imagination and maturity, endowed with style and talent, these being the signs of a predictable ascension. His exhibition, “Stations” – opened in November 2003 at he Eforie/Atelier 35 gallery – is nothing else than the beginning of his journey, the “point zero” of the search and definition of the self. By mixing transparent themes, motives, techniques and intentions, the artist is melting them at the high temperatures of auto-reference, in the good postmodern track or condition Lyotard asserted. Everything floats around Bogdan Mateias the individual, with his anxieties, fears, propensities and aspirations, varnished and echoing in the whole species he is part of. An artist who is writing and illustrating himself – in a stern manner when creating his work, jokingly when displaying it, inviting us at the same time to decipher its meaning.

In their defining/characteristic features, the works of Bogdan Mateias are placed within the boundaries of the figurative neoexpresionism, which feeds on the daily imaginary and the personal mythografy. Their main sources are the family photos, the urban graphic symbols, the cuttings from the art history and the comics. The tools or the means of expression range from painting and installation framed ready-made objects, thought and used as significant pieces of an identity unit. By objectifying its combustions that swing between past and present, the artist configurates a really narrative imbroglio, in which the leaps from the grandmother’s “Golden Age” to the wisdom tooth and from the childhood’s innocence to the first sexual pulsions are taking place abruptly, through flashbacks and recurrences. The depths are reveled ever since the beginning of the excurse. The installation called “The human body and the abstract sign” – made of synthetic sheet painted in acryl and bitumen after dental and cranial radiography, along with the human condition and its paradoxes. The human being, decreased to its very essence, between the skeleton and the concept, loses its aura and turns into a shape void of content and deprived of identity. What could give it substance and specificity, except for memories, willing or affects? It is the next station Bogdan Mateias is leading us to. By cutting up in mind motives from Rembrandt’s work, he apparently merges them in an aleatory manner, with the interrupted movie of some forbidden dreams and its own hypertrophied image, in a composition with hyperrealist nuances. It is now that the fact becomes obvious the artist usually works on large surfaces, bi-dimensional supports and with wide coloured plans, achieving monumental effects through clear-obscure techniques and pictural gestualism, by using bitumen, gasoline, rags and aerograph.

In the paintings called “The sisters” and “The first car” the narration becomes more nostalgic and personal. The young artist turns to good account memories fixed in the family album, reconstructing thus the scent and the ambience of a still unforgettable fin de siècle. The pictures are recomposed in black and white, while the intermediary hues are eliminated, so as to bestow an optic and sensitive prominence to the characters that decided his destiny or put a mark on it: grandfather, mother, the aunts. We are talking about a playful exercise meant to retrieve the past and preserve it into a “museum” of the past times, turned into personal history, with accidents, harmonies and casts of light and shadows. The labour and the sacrifice the growing up implies are ironically substantiated in the triptych “Gotta catch’em all!”, a three-stages passage condition, from exuberance to solemnity, from escape to registration, from neoclassicism to neopop. The funny Pokemon of the children born under the postmodern sign and framed by classic architecture becomes the original symbol of an entire generation and of its innocence, which has been lost in the turbulence of the “New Age”. Original and inexhaustible appears to be the catalogue of the plastic languages Bogdan Mateias employs in order to write his history. The artist leaves nothing aside. He invents, selects and combines to the limits of the possible. The exigencies of the truth laid in the work are outrunning the purely aesthetical aspiration, so the truth laid in the work are outrunning the purely aesthetical aspiration, so that the intrusion of the neodada and ready-made details is perfectly justified. Grandma’s slippers, mum’s gloves and dad’s collection of illustrated cards, along with the lead cast of soles (in the triptych “Ages”) and the gypsum cast of mother’s hands are time’s imprints, placed in boxes and religiously kept, as a late fulfillment.

The appetence for retrospective gesture, the lucidity of the visions, the vigour of the displaying and the poetry of memory are truly defining the profile of an artist that has his lot, namely Bogdan Mateias. One could say that his exhibition is placed under the frontispiece of Foucault’s rhetorical question: “Could not the life of any individual be regarded as a work of art?”. By traveling through the “Stations”, Bogdan Mateias attempted an answer: it could indeed, only if through one’s work, one can deliberately depart from one’s biography.

Text by Simona Nastac, published in Arhitext Design Magazine, pages 64-65, no. 12, December 2002