Entitled “Looking at the Big Picture from the Inside”, the installation (600 x 300 x 400 cm), made by the artist Nicolae Comănescu from various accumulations of materials, fragments of furniture and clothes received from relatives, highlights a new inside / outside paradigm shift, overturning the famous Think outside the box to look at things from the inside.
About his new artistic approach, Nicolae Comănescu states: “At first glance, it turns into dense volumes of color, inflexible indicators of meaning, movement and rotation. Clothes lose their original functionality, textile properties, structure and density. It changes its insulation and lacing and turns into a heavier plastic magma that flows in new directions.”
During the DoiJoi event, the artist revealed to the public through a performance-type action “layers of information” from the creation process of the installation – The interventions resuming a persistent theme in the artist’s practice of rendering erotic scenes or street demonstrations with “seminal” brushstrokes”, finals on the surface of the works. The action was completed by a debate between the artist and the curator about the deep meanings of the installation in contemporaneity, resuming the discussion of an important theme in Nicolae Comănescu’s philosophy of art: escape.
The markings on the “surfaces” of the works are closely connected with both the Idea of space and the theme of escape – the plastic substrates overlapped, rendering meta-spatial effects with inception elements, from which the artist continuously plans his escape, an escape that can be viewed both on a micro level, inside a work, and on a macro level, outside it and inside the entire installation.
“Born in 1968, in a system refractory to change, Comănescu continuously lives the chronic obsession of escape; so strong, and so intense, that he ends up creating, in the absence of a context of constraints, his own prison from which to engineer his escape.” Elena Est, curator
The works within the installation are part of an ongoing concept, which debuted in 2020 at the Cluj space of the Invitro gallery with the exhibition The Great General Scheme of All Things. In August 2023, the second exhibition, entitled The Great General Scheme of All Things, took place at /SAC. The beginning”. The scheme included, for the first time, the textile assemblages made in 2023 and vandalized by the artist with acrylic touches, the last layer of acrylic representing the abstract organizational chart of some street battles and erotic scenes – large and recurring themes in the artist’s practice.
