Bogdan Mateiaș – Docu-Fiction and Appropriation
The contemporary post-media visual space is defined by traditional art forms’(painting, sculpture) loss of inherent corporeality, coupled with a de-canonization and blurring of the boundaries between those and other art mediums, as well as new media.
The hybridization of artistic practices, intermedia discourse, and the exploration/linkage of various thematic human knowledge sources, often scientific, are shaping visual thinking as well as the creative process.
The artist researches contextually and creates the image/art object while conceptually self-aware, being mindful of these de-specificities and creating new modes of artistic expression, display formulas, and cultural reception. In Romania, booth the visual and performing arts, in synch with the international scene, are engaged in a sometimes-bulimic dynamic search for innovation, for an overreaching narrative where the terms post-media has emerged as a tool for mapping out this real-virtual, imaginary, objectified, spatialized, and multi-layered territory existentially integrated in the growing contemporary visual communication hive.
In the local post-media scene, Mateiaș Bogdan stands out through his investigation of memory in contexts generated by various time-space vectors that create a reinvention of the historical photo archive through personal docu-fiction. The artist takes photographs from the internet featuring anonymous people that he rearranges into unexpected situations in relation to other elements, accompanied by meditative personal reflections. The image is thus both change and planning, acceptance and escapism into possible mythologies, in a non-historical time where multiple past-presents co-exist and the future seems to be just a repetition.
“I am an image creator that uses the WWW in order to unearth and interpret anonymous memories or peripheral histories.” (M. B.)
“Photographs taken by unknown people with unknown people help me create my own personal emotion scenographies and visual archaeologies.” (M. B.)
One of his first projects, Our Memories [Amintirile noastre], 2007, entailed a complex research on the fate of the Babadag sugar factory, dismantled and abandoned after 1990. A source material and methodology, Mateiaș Bogdan used an archive based on recollections and photographs gleaned from the community. Photographs from the archive, as well as collages by the artist were projected into a derelict industrial space, temporary turned into a media environment.
The artist’s works either by themselves or put in dialogue with each other in monograph shows as large-scale installation where the visual discourse shifts from painting to neon-art, collages, video projections, and objects, bring forth a world of happenstances and feelings of anonymous actors in subliminal visual conversions that oblige us to reflect on war, aggression, and human values, on ourselves and others. In his painting and collage series The Dark History, beyond the ironic accents, sarcasm, and the artist’s critical view on history, we also find a deep compassion for an existential perpetuum mobile.
Painting is archaeology, he declares. Photographs and found images are transferred and superimposed onto multiple canvas layers. Reality fragments bearings semantics interfere, dissolve, and disappear beneath random (accidental, hazardous) canvas strokes, reconfigured as mnemonic palimpsests.
The hybridization of artistic practices, intermedia discourse, and the exploration/linkage of various thematic human knowledge sources, often scientific, are shaping visual thinking as well as the creative process.
The artist researches contextually and creates the image/art object while conceptually self-aware, being mindful of these de-specificities and creating new modes of artistic expression, display formulas, and cultural reception. In Romania, booth the visual and performing arts, in synch with the international scene, are engaged in a sometimes-bulimic dynamic search for innovation, for an overreaching narrative where the terms post-media has emerged as a tool for mapping out this real-virtual, imaginary, objectified, spatialized, and multi-layered territory existentially integrated in the growing contemporary visual communication hive.
In the local post-media scene, Mateiaș Bogdan stands out through his investigation of memory in contexts generated by various time-space vectors that create a reinvention of the historical photo archive through personal docu-fiction. The artist takes photographs from the internet featuring anonymous people that he rearranges into unexpected situations in relation to other elements, accompanied by meditative personal reflections. The image is thus both change and planning, acceptance and escapism into possible mythologies, in a non-historical time where multiple past-presents co-exist and the future seems to be just a repetition.
“I am an image creator that uses the WWW in order to unearth and interpret anonymous memories or peripheral histories.” (M. B.)
“Photographs taken by unknown people with unknown people help me create my own personal emotion scenographies and visual archaeologies.” (M. B.)
One of his first projects, Our Memories [Amintirile noastre], 2007, entailed a complex research on the fate of the Babadag sugar factory, dismantled and abandoned after 1990. A source material and methodology, Mateiaș Bogdan used an archive based on recollections and photographs gleaned from the community. Photographs from the archive, as well as collages by the artist were projected into a derelict industrial space, temporary turned into a media environment.
The artist’s works either by themselves or put in dialogue with each other in monograph shows as large-scale installation where the visual discourse shifts from painting to neon-art, collages, video projections, and objects, bring forth a world of happenstances and feelings of anonymous actors in subliminal visual conversions that oblige us to reflect on war, aggression, and human values, on ourselves and others. In his painting and collage series The Dark History, beyond the ironic accents, sarcasm, and the artist’s critical view on history, we also find a deep compassion for an existential perpetuum mobile.
Painting is archaeology, he declares. Photographs and found images are transferred and superimposed onto multiple canvas layers. Reality fragments bearings semantics interfere, dissolve, and disappear beneath random (accidental, hazardous) canvas strokes, reconfigured as mnemonic palimpsests.
Text by Marilena Preda Sânc, published in Arta Magazine, pages 60 - 63, no. 50 - 51, 2021