Bogdan Mateias

Flexible Memories, the most recent series of works I started in 2011, are an attempt at personally re-contextualising characters that lived nearly two hundred years ago.
I chose my characters from the photo archive Mathew Brady set up in the 19th century in the United States of America. The selection criterion was strictly subjective, visual elements in each image (such as the character’s outlook and costume) taking precedence over any historical significance the characters might have had. To me, the characters depicted were totally unknown, and they remained that way to the very end.
I use collage to change the initial image which thus becomes flexible and lends itself to interpretation. By overlapping visual elements (addresses from picture cards, prints from early-20th century dictionaries), Henry F. Darby’s Flexible Memories and Thomas Hart Clay’s Flexible Memories gradually turn into a layering of materials and textures, culminating in working techniques that differ from one work to the next. I use oil paints topped with pigment powder, oil colours with or without linseed oil, in varying layer structures, to obtain textures out of colours.
Though only recently produced over a short period of time, many works already show surface flaws as the correct oil painting technology (fat over lean) was disregarded and effects became visible as soon as colours began to dry. Ensuing cracks may disturb someone who knows the technique well, but I regard them as the natural result of the speed with which they were created. Though I was not anticipating this result, I take it positively, since I was interested in obtaining colour structures.
Ladies walking, made in 2010, belongs to a different series of works. During that period I was experimenting with materials not frequently used in painting. I was seduced by the beautifully transparent bitumen used in construction and tried to introduce it in painting on canvas, after having completed a long series of works on plastic foil. Following studio experiments I noticed that no matter how the canvas was prepared, it absorbed bitumen prior dissolved in petroleum or turpentine. The solution was to isolate the canvas with a varnish or a lacquer before I started painting. Thus I managed to obtain a transparency effect similar to the one I had obtained on the plastic foil. Following a two-day surface drying time, I painted using oil colours over the bitumen. Under the pressure of the brush and due to air temperature, the two materials began to fuse and the resulting mix proved damaging to the oil colours. Once the painting dried thoroughly, I noticed that in certain areas the bitumen had stained the oil painting on top of it, even if this was very thick.
Another series in which I combined different materials bears the same title, Flexible Memories, but in this case works were made on photographic paper. In these works I printed the same type of characters taken from old photographs (cropped and reshuffled or used as such), incorporating or using them as a support over which I painted in oil or acrylic paints, I printed drawings or made gestural calligraphies and selective interventions with transparent glazes and colour markers.
In my view, the technical diversity obtained by combining many materials (oil and pigment, oil and pastel, bitumen and oil on canvas, oil on photographic paper) supports the concept that underlies the entire series of works.

Text by Bogdan Mateias, published in the catalog Contemporary Histories in the Studio: Artistic and Scientific Perspectives, pages 133 - 134, 2013