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‘The Unnerving Inches of Being’ - Alex Mirutziu's Solo Exhibition at SABOT Gallery, Cluj

Added on May 30, 2019 by Alex Mirutziu.

Photos: YAP Studio

THE UNNERVING INCHES OF BEING

May 31 - July 10, 2019

Opening hours: TUE – SAT, 4pm - 7pm

SABOT

Fabricii de Chibrituri 9A, Cluj-Napoca

‘The unnerving inches of being’ concludes few years of research on the work of novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch and the different methodologies she employed to create meaning. Preceded by Between Too Soon and Too Late, which took place at Delfina Foundation in 2018 (Mirutziu’s first solo exhibition in the UK), ‘The unnerving inches of being’ brings together a series of works informed by Murdoch’s writings and further reflects on the notion of time and space in relation to meaning.

Extending over a wide range of media and activities, including sculpture, drawing, poetry, and performance, as well as critical and curatorial projects, Mirutziu’s practice questions the way we create meaning to interpret the world around us. Highly intellectual, inspired by philosophy, literature and design, the artist explores the inadequate use of objects, language, and the body as tools of communication, confronting us with “dislocated modes of arrival at meaning.”

”Gaining in a State of Debt”: Alex Mirutziu`s first solo exhibition in Israel opens at CCA Tel Aviv

Added on March 5, 2019 by Alex Mirutziu.

GAINING IN A STATE OF DEBT

Curated by Nicola Trezzi

Dates: March 14 – April 18, 2019

Opening: March 14 at 8 pm

Performance schedule:

March 14, 8 pm (opening)
March 19, 6 pm
March 22, 12 am
April 1, 8 pm
April 10, 8 pm
April 13, 1 pm (closing)

Performed by Oran Barak, Harel Grazutis and Nunzia Picciallo

The Center for Contemporary Art

Tsadok HaCohen 2, Tel Aviv-Yafo, Israel

www.cca.org.il

The Center for Contemporary Art (CCA) presents “Gaining in a State of Debt”, the first solo exhibition by Romanian artist Alex Mirutziu (1981, Sibiu, Romania. Lives and works in Cluj-Napoca, Romania).

Mirutziu’s practice extends over a wide range of media and activities, including sculpture, drawing, poetry, and performance, as well as critical and curatorial projects. In his work, which is both highly intellectual and deeply physical, he expands the notions of approximation and proximity in connection to time, presenting “dislocated modes of arrival at meaning.” In his modus operandi, he seeks to facilitate the understanding of the body as a “turbulent performative occasion” – drawing on the poetics of homelessness and invisibility. Through his artworks, he looks at ways of suspending the set-ups of doing and un-doing, thinking and un-thinking. Alongside TAH29 (The Artist Himself at 29), he acts within a collective body whose modus operandi is “retroactive irony.”

His exhibition at CCA Tel Aviv features a new performative work, entitled Bottoms Know It, and a compilation of videos that contextualize the new work and at the same time open up new avenues of understanding. Conceived for CCA Tel Aviv and featuring three performers and three props, Bottoms Know It exposes what may come across as being implicit but unnoticed, which is not necessarily a feature of truth-making.

Through the combination of different streams of thoughts and informed by philosophical concepts that are always personalized and freely interpreted, the artist is capable of creating time-based and durational experiences between himself and the viewer, using the artwork – whether in the form of an object or a body (his own or somebody else’s) – as a channel, a catalyst, a sort of remote controller that is linking two individuals, himself and the viewer, possibly located in two different geographical and time zones. However, all the aforementioned notions never come as we usually expect them: “time-based” should be considered according to an unusual notion of time; “durational” should be perceived according to a larger scope of perception. The work of Alex Mirutziu not only makes us think, it also makes us think about the conditions allowing us to think, and un-think, to do, and un-do.

Video program (not on view during the performances):

Doing Sub Thinking, 2018. HD video, video documentation of performance, 10:51 min. Performers: Ekin Bernay, Rowdy_SS, and Jenn Vogtle. Commissioned by Block Universe Festival in collaboration with Delfina Foundation and European Art East Foundation, London. Courtesy of the artist, Galeria Sabot, Cluj-Napoca, and Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle, Munich. [video]

But as a document, 2015. HD video, performance to camera, 12:01 min. Performer: Pär Andersson; director of photography: Michael Tomescu. Courtesy of the artist, Galeria Sabot, Cluj-Napoca, and Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle, Munich. [video]

Dignity to the unsaid, 2017. HD video, 17:42 min. Word workers: Alex Popa, Irina Sibef, and Cosmin Stănilă; director of photography: Alexandru Don; camera assistant: Victor Merca. Commissioned by Marie-Laure Fleisch Gallery, Brussels. Courtesy of the artist, Galeria Sabot, Cluj-Napoca, and Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle, Munich.

Stay[s] against confusion, 2016. HD video, 14:53 min. Performer: Joshua Hubbard; director of photography: Kassandra Powell, Loukas Elark. Commissioned by Delfina Foundation, London. Courtesy of the artist, Galeria Sabot, Cluj-Napoca, and Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle, Munich. [video]

The gaze is a prolapse dressed in big business, 2018. HD video, 14:37 min. Commissioned by Frac des Pays de la Loire, Carquefou (France). Courtesy of the artist, Galeria Sabot, Cluj-Napoca, and Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle, Munich. [video]

***

“Alex Mirutziu: Gaining in a State of Debt” is curated by Nicola Trezzi in close collaboration with the artist. The exhibition is supported by Invitro, the OUTSET Residency in Tel Aviv, and the Romanian Cultural Institute – Tel Aviv. Additional support provided by Galeria Sabot, Cluj-Napoca and TAROM.

”Killer WATCHLIST for cool heads. 4 Cluj based artists to watch”, a text by Alex Mirutziu for Contemporary Lynx

Added on February 18, 2019 by Alex Mirutziu.

In times of a too fast art radar, in times of decreasing attention span and beat-skipping art market an easy stand of what makes and breaks can be a killer. My suggestions will give you at least for a while a break as you deserve it, I’m sure. Keep your head cool and track what these four artists based in Cluj-Napoca, Romania have in store for now but most importantly for the future.

FLAVIU ROGOJAN

Flaviu Rogojan cuts through the noise in the artistic community he is a part off, instrumenting technological means, from pencil to camera, analogue/digital computer games (GTA-Grand Theft Auto) an ethos which sets him apart in Cluj where he is currently based. We have to admit that when we look at his work we are viewing a technology-mediated portrayal of his thoughts and like Alan Hollinghurst, Flaviu is more excited by the idea of a place than the place itself. This is a modus operandi he uses as a curator for Aici/Acolo (Here/There), a pop-up gallery unique in Cluj. What he is getting at in his works has to do with ‘hidden-spaces’, ‘noise-tunnels’, loopholes, easy to imagine but impossible to access. He does the work for us, generating data, easy access codes (cheat-codes), makes alterations to existent HTML parameters allowing a novice access to these realities. One of them is the so-called ‘blue hell’ from a curated playlist of video anomalies shown in “From Within”, solo show at Pilot project space at Paintbrush Factory, where one of the game characters can break through walls, dive into an endless blue void, an error or breach in the game which unsettles the game’s own trajectory. Worth mentioning is “Tamagotchi life support” from the show De Rerum Natura at Natural Science Museum in Arad (2018), where Flaviu developed coded sequences to independently maintain into ‘existence’ a digital pet, housed in a small egg-shaped computer. The small robots feed it, play with it, take it to the doctor etc. The striking thing is that this device was glass caged along with stuffed birds and their habitat, performing a possible link in the overall evolution on the earth. A technology that in the end fails, part of Flaviu’s intention, but in its failing makes our understanding of the ‘pet’ and the supporting technology more human.

NORBERT COSTIN

The artist seems to navigate off the radar, pulling you into his work as long as there is a commitment to his subjective time. Norbert’s strength is almost synonymous to silence, a slow rendering of the surface of the work. And it is in this episodic silence that he is most potent. In An Expression of Time I, II, he directs our attention to the back of a silhouette facing the horizon at two visually distinct parts of the day. At first glance, we truly believe that that’s the case. After a second or third reading of the work, helped by inbuilt hints we start to peel off the layers to reveal the actual photographic process as the main character, the tool which generated such an appearance of day and night, hence of passing of time. In doing so he makes our mind recognise its power to imagine what is there and not there, hidden in plain sight. In Glacier (Equilibrium Line Altitude) he again de-tours our attention leaving the viewer in an antechamber, a place of incipient problem-solving. A Nordic phenomenon of managing cascading piles of snow, in the search to find its resting place takes centre stage solely by appearance. In the background, there are marks of indelible reality that cannot be escaped manifested in large scale marks of displaced chunks of ice, sharing their last breaths on paper, the final disappearing act of something we will not remember as being there in the first place.

OVIDIU LEUCE

When confronted with the works of Ovidiu Leuce I don’t care of what I feel, even though sometimes his works enact such possibility. Instead, I want to find out more. They tend to act as extensions of his thinking, moreover is views of who and where he is. What strikes me is that he thinks of himself as a painter, and fully articulates why so. When asked about his studies in Cluj and Italy he concludes that it was a time of great distress going from traditional training in painting to an experimental focused practice in Rome. Only that he stood firm with painting even though while in Rome he has overcome the canvas and traditional modes of using colour and photography. In “Notes on the melody of things”, a quote from Rilke whom he finds a bond, Ovidiu set’s off in another medium, this time ceramics, imbued with the use of moulds taken from ordinary objects from his surroundings. In a similar vein with Franz West and Nobel Prize winner for literature, Herta Muller, both major influences, he structures these mise-en-scenes with cut-outs, fragments from newspapers, imprints of textures new and old which are then incorporated into his clay objects. He has been looking at the notion of background and foreground in his most recent works questioning their power relation. In his recent collaborative performance at III Convivencias Cerámicas en Onda, Castellón, adjoined by a friend musician, Jósef Iszlai, Ovidiu sketched fragments of a composition of negative and positive spaces on a huge paper sheet on which a superimposed image of the actual wall, the resting place of the final work, eventually vanishes leaving the shapes suspended, historically extraterritorial.

RADU COMȘA

An artist whose longtime commitment to colour, harmony, surface sets him apart from his colleagues of the same generation. Given that, he entertains the idea of elaborate authorships, giving a voice to the onlooker, indirectly pulled into complex choreography of juxtapositions, and fine volumetric shapes, Comsa doesn’t make it easier for the public to stand-by his intellectual preoccupations. Nevertheless one finds a sense of distilled purity, a sense of proportion in shapes and surfaces which surpasses the tendency to overthink what takes place on the canvas. Instead, one is driven towards the sensuous qualities of his colour fields and their slow attachments on the canvas, or other textiles, layer over layer in an apparent brutal overlapping of pigments, which tend to reconcile in the eye of the viewer. Going back to the basic colours and to drawing in an attempt to make sense of his own physical proportion when exercising his works seems to be of interest, an approach which stems from the New York Avant-Garde of the 60’s —the notion that of the making and maybe even the meaning of a painting rests too on the biomechanics of the work’s own build-up, that space in between the artist and the surface. He mixes diluted pigments before-hand, delineating the composition with wax lines to avoid immediate contamination between colour fields, a process he calls synthetic. And if we think of his modus operandi as disputing nature not representing it, it makes sense in this aesthetic, softened by a comfortable scale, proportion and fair balance, which put to rest jolts of alienation and rejection.

Written by Alex Mirutziu

Alex Mirutziu is a Romanian artist who’s practice interrogates the process of how we create meaning to interpret the world around us. Inspired by philosophy, literature and design, he explores the inadequate use of objects, language and the body as tools of communication.