The best statement for now is Stefan Tiron text for "Grand Prix Remix" exhibition catalog.
(2004 - Grand Prix Remix, National Museum of Contemporary Art, Bucharest)
GRAND PRIX REMIX
Visual Shampoo Consumer Product – mid city shower version.
A compilation of cityscapes by NICOLAE COMANESCU
This is an exhibition with cityscapes and about common city trademarks.
It is an exhibition with paintings literally resulting out of a mix of different city perspectives. The perspectives of the city dweller such as you and me, of Nicolae Comanescu the city artist, of everybody who enjoys an active live in the middle of a modern metropolis such as Bucharest, New York, London, Berlin or Paris.
We have always painted, bought, exhibited paintings with city-inspired subjects or city-forged ideas; in fact it is impossible not to notice or depict the presence of our immediate architectural surroundings. Still, this time Nicolae Comanescu creates a kaleidoscopic urban mix uniting inside a single frame the actual and the past city, the cinematic and the future city. Nicolae’s exhibition is part of a larger trend that identifies the city as the major influence in image-production. We invest in our daily life in the city that surrounds us, while we help create its outer signs – neon signs, huge advertising billboards and lettered messages announcing new trends, labels and popular icons.
The city is more than a background while we go about our daily job routines, while we invest into our future prosperity. The city abounds in many shapes and colors and inspires its citizens with its ever-expanding energies. Inside the city art has become concrete reality; architectural blueprints, constructive ideas are shaped into visible, tangible, habitable bureau’s, flats, homes, hotels and cinema’s. Inside the city art has rediscovered its entertainment value.
Nicolae Comanescu’s paintings exhibit the omnipresence of the city and the need for its facilities and modern delights.
The biggest and heaviest entertainment producers such as the cinema and the video game industry also proclaim the presence of the city; the place where the film studio’s and the actor’s homes are at the place where the postproduction lab and game designers daily universe is based. It is beyond all a world familiar to all of us. A place so familiar that we feel it’s natural to see it in our homes, in our working places and on our screens.
In the end Nicolae Comanescu’s images act as re-combinatory windows (*).
Mirroring the city, these paintings offer glimpses as to the modern planetary city, spanning over the whole earth. These cities are the direct result of common aims, common traits and hundreds of years of constructing the first social and political global centers.
The lavish chic interiors and the general passion for fast, slick and smart car designs is well known to us. Car designs and prize motorcycle models always offer us a view of the future cities. The curves and fiberglas materials are all the testing sites of future developments influencing both architecture and/or the newfound comfort of the home appliance industry. Fordism and post-Fordism still remains a styling index as to our most prized goods and these paintings are proudly and joyfully declaring the visual preeminence of hot rods and upswept tail fins in our shopping culture.
Cities are vertical growing structures with ever-expanding margins, and Nicolae Comanescu’s paintings reach out over the horizon, enabling a 360 degree rotation; a free turning in search of new vistas. This should be the representation of free enterprise in action searching for new markets and the jagged graphics of the monetary index.
Stefan Tiron
From "GRAND PRIX REMIX - Visual Shampoo Consumer Product – mid city shower version" exhibition catalog.
* Reffering to Comanescu’s images see also the text by art critic and curator Ruxandra Balaci about the NOFOCUS-DEMO project pertaining to video and video stills presented at the Studio Tommaseo, 2003 Trieste Contemporanea Young European Artist.(cat.)
“( ) including a multiplicity of layers within one conceptual frame, ( ) images blurred out to create new realities with little or no connection to the departure point, thus subject to plenty of interpretations.
( ) The artist acts as a videocam - invoking also the faked glamour of surveillance- entering the forms, altering pre-existent realities. Supplying delusions and creating illusions. In this order the viewer is an accessory, unable to assert control.
Manipulation is explicitly exhibited on its largest scale, as key concept of nowadays civilization, as unit of fallacious surface, as dissolution of certainty. From –accepted- illusion to total immersion into it, video and computer art are merging, suggesting that everything could be captured by cameras/monitors/screens and URL-s.
Suggesting also the discrepancy between the fictitious world of the media and its pretence of objectivity. And finally that media reproductions aren’t necessarily depicting reality.
Deleting or changing information is somehow demonstrating that updating could be useless in the overflowing stream of data…but also that the uncontrolled becomes controlled.
** “ Rostopasca was a group of young Romanian artists: Angela Bontas, Alina Buga, Nicolae Comanescu, Gorzo, Alina Pentac, Floe Tudor and Mona Vatamanu,, active between 1998-2002.
Both funny and stressing, they hit up Bucharest ís boring art scene with spontaneous, surprising,even shocking interventions. They made all the time jokes and little scandals (as intelligent strategy).
No national specific stuff in their works, as they were the first Romanian generation to have no real connection with the ancient communist regime, the first to live since their teen age with mobile phones, computers, walkmans and MTV.
Dealing with hard-edged problems of contemporary life (not strongly polemical as the previous generation - Perjovschi or subREAL- used to be) but derisive in a most nonchalant way, they playfully deconstructed everything, humorously contesting everything, assuming underground subversive roles.“ (Ruxandra Balaci, NOFOCUS... Read More
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