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.

Text by Marilena Preda Sânc, published in Arta Magazine, pages 60 - 63, no. 50 - 51, 2021

Bogdan Mateias

Memories and recovery topics are present in many fields of human activity. Art is sensitive and focused on these directions of research at the beginning of the new millennium.

Within my art I mixed layers of images/meanings. The meaning of the image is different for each viewer. The picture is remapping through the cultural background of the viewer.

In my paintings I create new memories using collage techniques and mixing recovery memories from old photographs, letters and stamps.

My artworks consist of paintings, graphic arts, assemblage, media art, performance and photography. I work in all mediums because it’s of utmost importance for me that the story and the message within my works be as diverse as possible.

Text by Bogdan Mateias, published in the catalog BORA COLLECTION, page 260, 2015

One Day

The work makes references to the terrible, threatening images that announce disasters leaved behind the human carnage. Anatomical deformity of the body announces the distortion of the normality of life and the rapid movement of the airscrew suggest the time which expands, intensifying the terrible moments.  The yellow-greenish nuances widen on the body surface disintegrating it. The putrefaction ”steams” that rise up to the sky fill it with miasmas that foreshadow the end. One Day can be the unit measure for the duration of the race against imminent death. The image of a nude changes completely its meaning when it is inserted in such a context, arising terror and fear and infusing helplessness.

Text published on http://zimanauctions.com/

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

Impressions from SummArt Painter Campus, Kisinev, Moldova

In his works he invented memories by adding new layers of painted images with their own personal story. He mixed photos from XIX-th century, dictionary illustrations from the beginning of the XX-th century and fragments of letters. The painting is a collage of memories, were the personal memories of each viewer complete the work. The painting and her interpretation became a flexible image being interpreted differently from each viewer.

Text by Memet Subasi, published in the catalog SummArt 2012 Painter's Campus XI, page 5, 2012

Bogdan Mateias

Maybe it is more than just a coincidence that Bogdan Mateias was born and raised in Tulcea. Tulcea is the last important Romanian city which is passed by the Danube before it flows into the Black Sea. His anthology Playground on riverside shows the wideness of the Danube and the periphery to the horizon, but the sky occupies the most space on the three pictures. These elements are typical for a lot of European landscape. By using domestic object like a buoy, a boot or a pole, which shows the water level and mark of the last flood, the artist changes the European landscape into a domestic one.

The pictured children are inhabitants of the Danube river arm, called Chilia, next to the Ukrainian border. The documentary photos, which were used as pattern, were taken in two different seasons, but the children are showing the same posture. Surprised by the camera the children stopped to play and changed their posture instinctively to a posture, which is typical for the European portraiture of all time.

A new element, which cuts the monotony of the landscape is the portraits of the children on and in front of the landscape. A friendly and innocent note is given to the painting by the depiction of the portraits of the children on the background of the pyramidal construct.

The portrait of the children shows their internal world. They enjoy playing next to the river. Their acting is not influenced by social or economical restrictions. The different perception of the reality is shown by the artist and his working method. By painting the portraits of the children which seem surprisingly fresh, the technical guideline for the painting of landscapes and portraiture are not used anymore.

In his three paintings; medium size, oil on canvas; the painter used special colors for the priming coat to reach a homogenization of the dramatic palette. To gain a contrast between the portraits, the freshness of the landscape and the color explosion of the children portraits they are painted in black and white. They enclose the scene and “ignore” the technical as well as the conceptual guidelines on every color coat.

Text by Ion Stendl, published in the catalog Der Mensch. Der Fluss, page 125, 2011

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