Roman Tolici, one of the most acclaimed artists of the new hyperrealist wave, exhibits between February 22 and April 18, 2023, at the Art Museum Constanta. The opening of the personal exhibition “Pursuit of Happiness” took place on Wednesday, February 22, in the presence of the artist.

For this new series, Roman Tolici becomes an observer of capitalist reality, which he documents photographically and processes pictorially in compositions that ironically dilute the boundaries between reality and fiction.

A demanding traveler through our times, Roman Tolici ventures into the exploration of an outdated anti-universe: happiness, a subject rather rejected in the contemporary cultural discourse, very rarely updated philosophically and almost disappeared from the radar of everyday aspirations. The exhibition “Pursuit of Happiness” becomes a space for reflection on the condition of contemporary man, transformed through the filter of the neoliberal imperative to happiness. In the echo of some questions that remain unanswered, the works examine current paradoxes, succinctly noting ideas and impressions from the perspective of an exceptionalist current, which it balances, without exaltations, without blasé moments, and without common places. Through photorealistic effects, his painting amplifies the real, tests it, and stages it in a directed unreality.

“Roots once born from socialist realism support subjective versions in which Roman Tolici interprets the first and probably the most well-known of the promises of capitalist happiness: the American dream. Consumerist prosperity, an ethos that has its origins in the American Declaration of Independence, has become an absolute imperative of the last decades and a measure of performance in progress, while its absence is turning into a possible stigma of the new grammar of well-being.
Roman Tolici is an emblematic figure of Romanian capitalist realism, being a detective of the ambiguities that define contemporary man in relation to neoliberal expectations, pressures or promises.”
Valentina Iancu, Art historian

“The search for individual happiness is seen today as a selfish endeavor. Happiness, such an abstract, relative, and particular notion, is now seen as an illusion of a distant century, when the American Constitution turned it into a civil right. Today the pursuit of happiness is out of fashion. Rather, our quests have altruistic goals such as saving the planet, fighting for equality, inclusion, tolerance. The pursuit of happiness has become an intimate, shameful, if not immoral act. But even so, it did not cease to exist. In this context, the works in this series belong to a personal register, of the search in general. A search for meanings that justify existence. A search for beauty in the grotesque, a search for good in evil, a search for truth in lies. And vice versa”.
Roman Tolici

“Roman Tolici is part of generation 2000, a generation that marked the revival of painting on the Romanian contemporary art scene, by assimilating some languages ​​not long ago banned in Romania, inspired by the art of the capitalist West. This generation produced an invariable and long-awaited detachment from the reductionist poetics and, at the same time, from the somewhat art-friendly policies of the communist period, engaging in the process of connecting the local art scene to practices and survival strategies adapted to current needs. The Generation 2000 laid the foundations of the Romanian art market, still fragile and viewed with much suspicion, which is why the art critic Magda Cârneci calls inspired a generational tendency to return to the real in painting, “capitalist realism”, a suitable denomination about the themes addressed”, says Valentina Iancu, art historian, author of a text accompanying the exhibition.

“The project continues a path of existentialist searches that Tolici started from the beginning: if we look at his first series of works, then we discover a multiple self-portraits, shaken and biological, and metaphysical: approximations, distortions, limits, impotences, violence, howls, perplexities, conversions. Desire, love, sex, loneliness, or death… Roman Tolici didn’t shy away from attacking hard subjects, apparently exhausted, mobilizing in this sense a troubling visual vocabulary”, assessed the art historian Oana Tănase.

Roman Tolici was born in 1974, in the village of Ghetlova, Orhei District, located in the center of the Republic of Moldova (former USSR), approximately 75 km from Chisinau. His artistic studies began at the “Igor Vieru” Art School in Chisinau, but Tolici’s interest in image and visual culture was nurtured from his early years, in the family.

In 1990 he settled in Bucharest, thanks to a scholarship at the “Nicolae Tonitza” Art High School, granted by the Romanian state. In 1998, Tolici defended, through a public exhibition (organized at the Palace of the Parliament, the “Constantin Brâncusi” Hall), the bachelor’s thesis entitled Identities (coordinating professor: Nistor Coita), within the Department of Graphics of the National University of Arts in Bucharest.

At the end of the 1990s, Tolici experimented equally in the field of literature, illustration and animation, comics, and photography, so that, starting in the 2000s, he established himself as a painter through personal and group exhibitions.
Associated with photographic realism infused with poetry and a surreal sense of everyday existence, Tolici is one of the representative artists of Generation 2000. His paintings seem to be details of a monumental story related to the general questions and anxieties of man. This narrative force transforms recurring subjects into endless chapters, and reflections of everyday life into projections of time, memory, and traces captured by the artist’s tender perception.

Project organized by the Constanța Art Museum, in partnership with the Kontakt Association and the Mobius Gallery in Bucharest.

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