Nicolae Comenscu, Looking at the Big Picture, 2024 Installation with clothes assambled on wood furniture
In the first month of 2024, we were launching, together with Comănescu, the opening of a new institution. An artistic one, of course. And one that’s also a bit bizzare/unusual. Born from clothes. The public was thus invited to enter a meta-room, in the artist’s workshop, located in Amzei square. Exhibited as an immersive, site-specific installation, the new institution invited the public to enter an inside/outside paradigm shift.
Entitled Looking at the Big picture from the inside / Privind la marea pictură din interior – the installation (600 x 300 x 400 cm), with its on-going status, offers a new perspective: it turns up side down the very famous English saying “think outside the box” in order to look at things from inside the “box”. Created as a puzzle of multiple works, the new institution inquires, specifically through this type of display, the true purpose of art. And in this case, the truth puts on, in the most literal sense of the word, the clothes of the person next to us, because the installation is created from clothes which the artist got from friends and family.
Within this institution, where Nicolae Comănescu plans a new escape (one of the artist’s most important themes in his search for truth), the role of art is explored, what is its purpose anymore in a society that is in such a metaphysical and institutional crisis, and what could be the objectivity of art in a world that belongs to technological progress. In the search for this objectivity, within the installation, different creators, people who love and hate art, are invited to enter. The following events will be announced on the artist’s social media pages.
From the curatorial text:
“Subconsciously or in a programmed way, I’ve always tried to create an institution where I could retreat, evolve and escape from: the Rostopasca Group (1997-2001), the National Contemporary Art Store (2009-2012), the magazine Tura Bar (2003-2004) or digest magazine The Temporary (2007-2013-present) were this kind of institutions for me – spaces where the truth found its resonance box” – Nicolae Comănescu
Born in 1968, in a system resistant to change, Comănescu perpetually 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 he can devise his escape.・- Elena Est
The escape is put in motion by the need for understanding a meta-real process, which generated 鍍he realness・:the meaning created by accumulation. – Dan Popescu, curator at H’art Gallery
About Nicolae Comanescu:
Nicolae Comănescu (aka Comă) was born on November 14th in Pitești. In 1998 he graduated from the the painting section of the Bucharest University of Arts, in the class coordinated by Ion Sălișteanu.
He is the founder of the Rostopasca group, one of the most rebellious artistic groups in Romania, which marked the years of transition from socialism to capitalism. Humor, irony, social intelligence, versatility and protestant civic spirit are attributes that made the artist a survivor of life in the city. Also nicknamed the star of Berceni (the part of Bucharest where Comănescu has lived since 2008), Comănescu showed a major interest in the topic of recycling, the accumulation of matter and its reuse in different aspects, using dust, slag, ash from small barbecues, cement and adobe, as well as used materials, such as textiles and objects from his household inventory.
He participated in numerous personal and group exhibitions in Romania and abroad, including the 2001 Venice Biennale, together with the Rostopasca group, Rostopasca Insert in Context Network, 49 Venice Biennial, Romanian Pavilion
