GORZO: NOTHING MORE, NOTHING LESS
One of Romania’s most acclaimed contemporary artists, Dumitru Gorzo recently presented Pictodrom, a solo exhibition at Arsmonitor Gallery, curated by Silviu Pădurariu. Bringing together the artist’s most recent paintings—created both in his studios in Pennsylvania and Bucharest, as well as directly within the gallery space—the exhibition proposed an immersive visual journey, inviting viewers into Gorzo’s painterly universe. Familiar motifs from his artistic vocabulary unfold in vibrant, tension-filled compositions whose energy often seems to extend beyond the edges of the canvas. We spoke with the artist, exclusively for our magazine, just before his departure from Romania, to discover the story behind this exhibition.
LD: "Pictodrom" brings together works created both in your Pennsylvania studio and directly inside the gallery. How did this dual geographical, spatial and cultural context influence your creative process and the visual narrative of the exhibition?
D.G.: I believe this is the first exhibition in which I consciously turned the presentation of two bodies of work—each produced on a different continent—into the subject itself. The collaboration with Silviu Pădurariu, the exhibition's curator and the driving force behind Arsmonitor Gallery, proved instrumental, not only in shaping the display itself but, more importantly, in highlighting the different dimensions these two series acquire within the exhibition. It created an additional layer of meaning, a kind of deepening of the visual discourse. I'm still not sure whether it's multidimensionality or simply an escape from the so-called "problems of painting." In any case, that doesn't really matter. As both a concept and a finished exhibition, it works.
LD: You have exhibited extensively both in Romania and internationally. How does the reception of your artistic discourse change depending on the cultural and geopolitical context in which your work is presented?
D.G.: Painting is far more closely connected to the context in which it is created than we usually like to admit. The desire to establish a universal form of communication is an old one, and images have naturally been assigned that role. Yet this has also encouraged an overly simplistic—and often counterproductive—way of relating to the visual arts. The expectation that an artwork should be immediately understood everywhere, with or without theoretical context, has pushed aside the importance of the viewer's body, presence and unique, unmediated experience in relation to the image. From my own experience, I know that the reception of an image changes when it is exhibited in a place entirely different from the one where it was created. The shift you refer to becomes apparent in the way local audiences manage to unravel—or weave—the relationship between the image and its geographical interpretation. Yes, geographical interpretation exists. We all practise it. Sometimes it serves us well; sometimes it doesn't.
LD: Throughout your career you have created numerous site-specific interventions directly on gallery walls. At Arsmonitor, you stretched canvases over four metres long and painted them only a few days before the opening. What was it like working on site at Arsmonitor, and what did you learn about yourself during that process?
D.G.: It confirmed that I still function well under pressure. It also showed me how the presence of another mind, actively involved in shaping the exhibition as an installation, can influence the way the work is ultimately perceived. The first painting I completed there, displayed alone on the walls, possessed a presence—and a violence—that could almost have created administrative problems within the building. The way Silviu decided to work with the paintings brought from the United States altered the reality of that work. It remains just as present and just as violent, but now that is no longer the point. Now it is about painting itself.
Photography by Ars Monitor
Interview by Lina Țărmure
Discover the full version of this interview in Volume IV.