I spoke with the members of NOIMA group, a collective of artists who have been actively shaping the art scene for over twenty years. We explored together the group’s debut, its remarkable journey, and many projects developed over time locally and abroad.
NOIMA Group consists of the artists Ciprian Bodea, Cosmin Frunteș, Dan Gherman, Andrei Rosetti and Sorin Scurtulescu. Their artistic practice includes various techniques from painting to photography, video, happening and performance (etc.)
Angela Izvercian: Please tell us about the context in which the NOIMA group was formed. What stimulated you in this direction? To what extent did academic experience or the existence of landmark artistic groups, such as SIGMA and Prolog, influence the formation of the NOIMA group?
NOIMA Group: It was a context anticipated by some college experiences and favored by the prospect of completing studies or going out into the world on one’s own. The atmosphere in the city, in the art faculty, was fostering group projects. We realize that calling this an “academic experience” is somewhat debatable. There are shades. Yes, we were in the academic space, but bureaucracy did not castrate creative initiatives. There was freedom in the faculty and a lot of pedagogical experiments.
At one time, we could opt for certain teachers and their offers. These proposal packages were called modules, and you recognized a particular workshop by the thematic or technological horizons, not by copying a teacher’s mannerisms. Oppositions, such as Ciucurencu – Baba, were translated in the painting workshops of the Timișoara faculty into the binomial Flondor – Nuțiu, although we also had the Sulea – Gorj option. There was the StudentFest, where students came from all over the country. In the exhibitions of the festival, some trends of coagulation of the people of Timișoara could be read. It was a kind of group of dreamers (a kind of oneiric movement); some of them were also active together in music; a feminist group was going to appear, and people were eager to join. It was at the end of the 90s there was a thrill of rediscovery of some interwar Romanian thinkers and there were also groups of young people who tried syncretic spiritual experiences or probed their own tradition, mystical Christianity.
Young artists were encouraged to debut at Galleria28. Then there was Zona – the festival organized by Ileana Pintilie. Coriolan Babeți, Ștefan Bertalan, Silviu Orăvitzan, and Sorin Dumitrescu were invited by Constantin Flondor and his team in the faculty; there were meetings with the students, lectures or even courses, and tasks coordinated by some of them together with the associate professor. In the workshop, from Flondor too, we learned about the world’s biennials, saw films about Sigma, and learned about Prolog. We had met some of the Prolog members. Mihai Sârbulescu, Horea Paștina, and Paul Gherasim also came to the faculty or to Galleria28. Ion Grigorescu could be found among young people at StudentFest.
We, ourselves, still students, related as a kind of group to some workshop topics, to the exhibitions in the small gallery of the faculty or held with the others in the city (at the museum, in the halls of UVT, at Galleria28 or in Bucharest – at Galeria Eforie), or when we were making small sketches for Ilena Pintilie’s seminar. We sometimes went out into the countryside together. We were testing association formulas.
In our case, Sorin Scurtulescu came with the first impulse, although the first discussions were from 2002-2003. Sorin wrote us an email from England, where he was an Erasmus scholar (Sunderland). It should be known that students, Romanians in general, did not move as freely as today. Sorin, therefore, added the perspective of the competition that the Western art market implied, on the orientation categorically influenced by a local effervescence and the different reports to nature and art of the groups 111, Sigma and Prolog. Sorin launched hypotheses about the members of the future group, partly confirmed initially. It also proposed a content horizon, it was an incipient dialogue.
NOIMA was initially composed of students from Timisoara in different years: Sorin Scurtulescu, Sorin Neamțu, Andrei Rosetti, Ciprian Bodea, Sorin Oncu, and Dan Gherman. Then Sorin Oncu (2005) and Sorin Neamțu (2009) left. Beyond the faculty, the first meetings followed the Prologue paradigm in a way, we remember Noima being aware that there would be a group for the first time in Tiberiu Adelmann’s Şiria garden (where we were joined for short visits by Constantin Flondor, Octavian Paler, the Bădescu family from Galleria28, Marius and Cătălin Lazurca, Sorin Pănuș and Dorin Belei, Lucian Spătariu).
In 2014, Cosmin Frunteș from Brașov joined us, on the same page with us but trained in Bucharest. Part of this last decade of Noima followed, with many openings and experiences both in terms of content and from the perspective of a public presence in the country and the world
A.I.: Is there a story regarding the choice of the name NOIMA?
N.G.: Yes. It was funny at first, then somewhat difficult and finally natural. The name of the group came up unexpectedly during a dialogue in which we were doing just that – searching for a suitable word for our still unformed thought. Version after version was circulated, and the only thing we could repeatedly agree on was that none of the words listed by us made sense, in this case, ours. Still repeating this conclusion: it doesn’t make sense, it doesn’t make sense… suddenly, we understood that the word NOIMA (sense) was looking for us, was provoking us.
The hardest part was when we realized that a name has the quality of a statement, as well. It could have sounded as if we had been an authority- we owned the meaning, the name… as the people say, we reinvented the wheel, an arrogant posture.
There were some heated discussions between us, the difficulty appeared to cover the serious shades with which the tradition of Greek thought had invested this word. But there is also the perspective of searching for new meanings or the more relaxed approach to the word noima in Romanian. Those of us who remained in the group agreed that it remains reasonable, and fertile, the thought of permanent search, and the years have brought something natural and new layers of meaning in relation to the group’s name.
A.I.: How is the NOIMA group positioned in the current Romanian cultural landscape?
N.G.: We are painters and we are seriously concerned with the language of painting and the mental structures that the practice of expression through painting develops.
Positioning can also mean place, time, and situation, and you used the phrase “cultural landscape”. It’s good. We were always in the landscape, in nature. We are also in culture, attentive both to its past (traces, sites, collections, museums) and to the present. Because, in our opinion, the current cultural landscape does not necessarily reject the past.
The architect Ana-Maria Goilav, with whom we often collaborate, opposes the term new age – the phrase no age. There are many things from the past that are slow to wear off, remain or surprisingly return to the present. We are concerned, but not hysterically, or looking for ideological alignments, with what happens around us, in galleries with other artists or groups, in exhibitions but also on the street, in nature. We are, of course, also of our time. We travel quite a bit and try to remain open and sensitive to what we encounter – the Mexican experiences being one example.
Returning to the idea of positioning, if this can be possible, a Transylvanian note, with its nuances, seems statistically proven in NOIMA. Outside the incipient Timișoara – Arad axis, we can be found most often in Piatra Craiului in Şirnea, on the terraces of the Mureș River, at the Găbud hermitage, in Vienna.
Relative to the means, we express ourselves in various mediums – object installation, photography, video, actionism, mural art, etc. — recognizing that in all these, we somehow remain indebted to the painting and to the mechanisms of thought that it has been placed in us by it.
A multifaceted constant is the connection with nature. In nature, we developed a beginning that can be chronologically and conceptually linked to previous experiences of returning to plein air, to an observational or contemplative painting. From previous generations, we remembered Sigma and Prolog, experiences that somehow impregnated us through Flondor and his close ones. They opened the perspective towards the Andreescu Group or Poiana Mărului School, towards Tescani in a broader sense than Prolog and towards the early photorealism of Ion Grigorescu, Florina Coulin or Matei Lăzărescu, tendencies that we sometimes find in what our colleagues of the generation do.
Nature remains a subject for Noima, not only in painting and recent exhibitions (Paris, Lisbon, Puebla) but also in performative approaches (Light Air Wind, Purifying or Brushwood for example, held in Vienna and Budapest).
Another facet of our relationship with nature can be understood from Noima’s Land Art projects (Letter from Home or Small Representative of the Universe) in which we assumed dialogue with the generations mentioned above, with the art of Paul Gherasim or worked directly with the painter Constantin Flondor. In this way, we created ephemeral interventions that reminded us of nature imbued with meaning (Logos).
The last perspective that should be mentioned regarding Noima and nature is related to a series of actionist approaches that include the observational study. These actions had as finality a kind of resultant of some personal perspectives. Observing the perceivable nature, human nature or our own perceptions and reactions, we made collective works in which we understood the group as an organism, as a form of life and looked for language conventions that would lead these experiences to a result that could be a drawing or a collective painting, an intervention in situ, etc. (sessions 360, Horizons, Garden, Dimanche, Common Fields, Good Morning, etc.)
A.I.: Last year, in September, you celebrated 20 years since the founding of NOIMA group through a different retrospective exhibition at the Subterana Gallery of Casa Artelor. How would you describe the whole experience?
N.G.: Last year, we celebrated 20 years with 3 important exhibitions for us, and one way or another, the party continues. The first exhibition took place on the premises of the Casa Europa Mexico Foundation in San Miguel de Allende (with the support of the Romanian Cultural Institute, the Romanian Embassy in Mexico, etc.).
The space was special – a typical Mexican one-storey house with an atrium and skylight, a place with a lot of personality that included several galleries. We took advantage of this compartmentalization to somehow distinctly point out the painting, actionism, documents or video installations in our experience. At the first opening, we created a collective performative drawing in the presence of the public. After a while, we remodelled the exhibition and reopened it to the public, including painting done by the group on site. Essentially, almost every facet the group has had over time has been punctuated in a living, time-shaped event.
The exhibition opened in the Gallery of the Romanian Cultural Institute of Culture and Humanistic Research in Venice (with the support of the Romanian Cultural Institute) was centered on the painting of the Noima group. It was a concentrated summary, in which some of the recurrent themes and image types of the group paintings.
Between the two, there was an exhibition opened in Subterana Gallery of the House of Arts in Timișoara (County Directorate of Culture Timiș), originally thought as a retrospective of the drawing in Noima. It was a very special experience. The specificity of the location worked with us to radically influence our concept. Before the opening, there was a big flood due to a storm, and the seeping water caused serious technical problems. The space seemed unusable. With no electricity, with damp walls, anything you had displayed in there would have been destroyed. The solution proposed by Sorin Scurtulescu was to make an exhibition with drawings made in the dark, from memory, on an industrial synthetic material.
We worked with black and white permanent markers on large surfaces mounted on the brick walls of the gallery’s three rooms and in the underground corridor that connects them. Each of us drew in the dark, all five of us touching every surface. The result was a drawing dictation with retrospective figurative sequences but also areas with pure, abstract language. At the opening, we asked the public to look at the works using the flashlights of their phones as if in a catacomb. We, the hosts, also used a kind of dynamo lanterns when presenting the exhibition. The reactions were among the most diverse.
A.I.: The group emphasizes performance actions and collective exhibitions while simultaneously supporting individual exhibitions. Could this be the secret to the group’s longevity?
N.G.: Let it be! The group does not cancel individuality, we sought a balance between collective experience and personal research. Since 2015, when we started our collaboration with Denise Parizek, this limit has become more evident, Noima’s actionism has delivered over time results, a distinct product installed in a given space, drawn or painted on a support that keeps the traces of several hands, or preserved in a photographic or video document, etc. The exhibition NOIMA Action opened in 2022 was a synthesis of this new inventory of works.
Working together keeps us together like in a game. Playmates don’t stay isolated; they don’t play by themselves, but they do something together according to a certain grammar, game rules or moves decided with the others. However, we did not exclude improvisation, spontaneous reaction or accidents – there were such situations. Another fact that can be significant is that we agreed not to rehearse before a performative act, with all the risks especially when the rules and stages of the game are very clearly defined (Three Act Circle, Bringing Light).
A.I.: There might have been moments in the group’s history that endangered its existence. How do you handle conflict situations within the group?
N.G.: There were tensions, there were withdrawals, even the assumption of the conclusion of the project. The publication of the Annotations – Painting Lessons and the related exhibitions was a delicate moment, but it was this retrospective effort that filled the temporary gap in the group’s activity. Now we also operate according to a kind of Dostoevsky model. When we end up quarrelling, like the Karamazov brothers, we turn to the advice of the priest – a former colleague who graduated in painting and was also partly trained by Constantin Flondor in Timișoara, who chose the monastic path, Hieromonk Pantelimon Şușnea.
It is delicate and attentive to the human soul and the ways in which pride can be tempered or creatively converted. But he is also an experienced painter and a very good photographer. He relieves us with good, meaningful arguments. Alone, we would probably not be able to manage our weaknesses, pride, anger and pettiness that often give us the impression that we are each the only one who is right and who has the solution. We disclosed the hidden member of the group. The painter Marian Dobre has also been very close to us for many years, and the list can continue with Mihai Sârbulescu, Bogdan Vlăduță, Cristian Dițoiu, Codrina Ioniță, Ovidiu Bădescu, Ovidiu Ungureanu, Angela Hanc, Andrei Ispas and many others.
A.I.: How would you describe the relationship with the Romanian artistic environment?
N.G.: We tried to be open. In the beginning, guests were present in our exhibitions. There have been exhibitions made together with groups from the country or from other countries. We collaborated very well with the V8 platform in Karlsruhe, with the artists present in the collective projects initiated by Denise Parizek. Returning to the environment here, there are affinities that we have already partially enunciated.
Ileana Pintilie and later Denise Parizek are the curators who always had us in mind and followed us. Adriana Oprea encouraged us in the early years. Andrei Rosetti frequently collaborates with Maria Pașc. He is also active in research and curation centers of the Faculty of Arts and Design in Timișoara, and these connections keep us in indirect dialogue with several curators in the country. Robert Șerban and Horațiu Lipot were close to us from the beginning or episodically – in interesting collaborations. Sorin Scurtulescu brought Alan Jones and Mirela Stoeac-Vlăduți closer to the group. We have a cordial relationship with Diana Marincu, Alina Șerban, Mihai Pop, and Uca Băloiu without direct collaborations for now.
Our soul gallery is Galleria28, the place where we debuted and where Andrei and Maria still do curatorial experiments today. In recent years, we have collaborated constantly with the Galeria Romană in Bucharest. In the last decade, we have exhibited a lot in other countries. Still, in some of these approaches, we have been supported by the Romanian Cultural Institute, embassies or consulates, galleries and private entrepreneurs from the country and the diaspora who, we believe that have realized that we are a serious partner that honors commitments.
In the eyes of the general public of collectors, Noima still remains a grassroots artistic movement. Our audience is built primarily from the people who were present in our exhibitions, came into contact with our art, or whom we trained – because some of us are active or have also been active in private or state training institutions in the cities where we live, we held courses, workshops and could try what we teach with our activity. Of course, the actual circulation in the market and in collections of our works, reports about us, and the statistical mechanisms of social networks help us to observe the extent to which we manage to keep this audience close in the long term.
Our website is designed as a simple archive. Adrian Sinescu (ArtTactic collaborator) helped us to put our online presence in order in databases such as artfacts.net, a professional site (correlated with the Limna application) that can give a somewhat more real picture of the activity of artists in the country and from the world, beyond impressions and conjunctural praise. According to this website, in recent years, we have been ranked among the top five groups in the Romanian contemporary art.
A.I.: Over time, you have had multiple exposures abroad. You have organized and participated in over 70 art events in 13 countries in Europe and recently exhibited at the Museo Internacional del Barroco in Mexico. How is the Romanian contemporary art received on the international art scene?
N.G.: The reactions are varied. For the Europeans, we don’t think that Romania itself is something exotic anymore. This does not mean that life is easier for us, but we cannot complain about the way we were received in Paris, Lisbon, Vienna, etc. Images of these beautiful meetings can also be seen on our website. We are well received; Brâncusi helps us here. We are helped by the generations already well represented in the world’s first-hand museum collections and galleries. We are confused by the lack of coherence in the Romanian cultural export. If we forget the Brâncusi case, debatably supported by his country of origin for a good period of time, what other examples of sustained and coherent promotion do we have in the visual arts? There are very few cases. It was Țuculescu that our institutions got bored of after several years of coherence.
For Noima, the last exhibition in Mexico was a joy for several reasons. Several institutions have reacted positively to our facts accumulated in 20 years of activity. Then, the exhibition was visited by more than 12,000 visitors; it had good reactions in the press, and there were posts with a record impact for Norma. Beyond all that, on the spot we felt absolutely no difference between the way the technicians handled Goya’s exhibit, that of the Mexican muralists, or ours. The public present at the opening was very warm and very curious to see European paintings and also our perspective on Mexico. The duration of the exhibition was extended by two months, in the context in which the host museum in Puebla is an extremely active one.
A.I.: Most of the time, when entering a contemporary art exhibition, the public is faced with the famous question, is this art?; Have you experienced such reactions? Why do you think contemporary art is challenging for the viewer?
N.G.: After Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Beuys, Piero Manzoni, Marina Abramović or Maurizio Cattelan, the definition disappears, but the soul and the mind do not. The challenge remains. To de-stress the relationship between art and the audience, it may be useful to stop taking ourselves so seriously. Both us, and the public. Let’s enter the galleries as a playground or a space of exploration with an open heart and mind. We can’t like everything; sometimes artists make anarchic gestures, rebel, and no longer focus on beauty. If something appears in front of me that amazes me, that I resonate with, or that is worth contemplating more, something that can reveal deeper meanings to me, with meaning, I am lucky. But let’s not enter the galleries with fixed or preconceived ideas.
Regardless of the reactions of the public, Noima will experiment further. We do not make art for a certain audience or taste, but we try to detach ourselves from such recipes. What we present can be appreciated or not by a 3-year-old child but also by a 99-year-old adult, from any category. Perhaps depending on the sensitivity, openness or knowledge of the public, more intense or not, deeper or more superficial experiences can take place. Or maybe sometimes it just doesn’t work out, but sometimes it does. It’s not just the audience’s responsibility.
A.I.: The contemporary artist has an unlimited number of mediums to choose from. In your case, painting remains the predominant medium of expression even if you explore a multitude of artistic mediums, from photography and video to happening and performance. Do you see current pluralism as an advantage or a disadvantage?
N.G.: It is an obvious advantage. It can also be a scattering in too many ways of the artistic language. Technology has brought with it new typologies of the image. We had discussions with the painter Constantin Flondor in which we imagined what 111 or Sigma could have achieved in their interventions in nature if they had a drone equipped with a video camera in the 70s. But in the end we are talking about poetry. Of timelessness or the temporal node quality that a work of art can possess. Contemporary art is not only measured by the variety of language, but also by the poetic or visionary scope it has or will have over time. It is said about Nichita Stănescu that he somehow measured the quality of his poetry by relating it to the Psalms. His conclusion was apparently always pessimistic about his own poetry. He may have understood his worth all too well…
A.I.: Is there something you’d like to experience, but the right context hasn’t come along yet?
N.G.: Painting remains a field of eternal experiment. But, yes, we want to produce an exhibition in a suitable space and with a suitable budget in which we create some three-dimensional objects from various transparent materials that we now only have in our minds or sketched on paper. We imagine large works of collective painting in which we can test work formulas that can remind both of Dadaist approaches and of working in a guild or studying in plein air.
The experiences of performative painting and street art, or relatively recent experimental iconographic projects, have prepared the ground for new explorations. We have recently also tested a collective way of working in nature, in situ – somewhere in Piatra Craiului, where we descended into a space having only discussions along the way, not knowing from the beginning where we would stop and what “tools” that place will provide us. It was very interesting, an extraordinary time together in which we drew with leaves, filmed the relationship of the human body with beam structures left there by local people, and improvised structures using scraps of wood and stones “from the supply”.
A.I.: What future plans do you have, and how do you see the course of the NOIMA group in the coming years?
N.G.: Next comes an update of the archive and the publication of an extensive catalog, a synthesis of the 20 years. We try to focus; there will be fewer public presences that we want to be more relevant to ourselves first. Live content, awake gaze. We will look for the most appropriate spaces to show what we do. We wish we could spend more time working together or alone.
