+40 726 152 156
Open: Wed-Sat 5pm-8pm

Piața Amzei 13, District 1, 010343, Bucharest, Romania
Open: Wed-Sat 5pm-8pm

Visit    

Artist: Roman Tolici

Constanța Art Museum
Tomis Boulevard no. 82-84
Constanţa

Happiness is an outdated theme, said Andrei Pleșu not long ago. Roman Tolici, a par excellence painter of our times, ventures into the exhibition "Pursuit of Happiness" inside a subject rarely culturally discussed, even less often revised philosophically and exterior to the radar of daily news. And when it is addressed, for example, in the film with the same title (Pursuit of Happiness, 2006), it is understood exceptionally by association with the fulfilment of the American dream of consumer prosperity. This ethos is rooted in the American declaration of independence, which includes among its amendments the right of man/citizen to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." The most recent artworks signed by Roman Tolici presented at the Constanța Art Museum, part of the "Pursuit of Happiness" exhibition, project us into a register of questions derived from the paradoxes of the contemporary human condition, most often left unanswered.

Considered through the filter of the neoliberal pressure on happiness as a performance, "Pursuit of Happiness" becomes a space for contemplation about the condition of contemporary man. Thus, this effort continues a path of existentialist quests, which Tolici created from the beginning: "If we look at the first series of artworks, then we discover multiple self-portraits, startled, both biologically and metaphysically: approximations, distortions, limits, impossibilities, violence, screams, perplexities, conversions. Desire, love, sex, loneliness or death - Roman Tolici did not shy away from striking challenging, apparently exhausted subjects, using in this sense a disturbing visual vocabulary", noted the art historian Oana Tănase*, in an essay dedicated to his body of work. Roman Tolici is an observer of the capitalist reality, which he documents photographically and processes pictorially in compositions that ironically dilute the boundaries between reality and fiction. Through photorealistic outcomes, his painting amplifies the real, tests it and orchestrates it in a staged unreality.

The artist is part of the 2000s generation, an age that marked the revival of painting on the Romanian contemporary art scene by embodying a language 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, making a commitment to the process of connecting the local art scene to practices and survival strategies adapted to current needs. The 2000s generation laid the foundations of the Romanian art market, still fragile and viewed with much suspicion, which is why the art critic Magda Cârneci accurately named the generational tendency to return to the real in painting, "capitalist realism", a suitable denomination in relation to the themes approached. Roman Tolici is an emblematic figure of Romanian capitalist realis being a detective of the ambiguities that define contemporary man in relation to neoliberal expectations, pressures or promises.

Excerpt from the text written by Valentina Iancu (art historian)

*Oana Tănase - "Roman Tolici" in Arta Magazine - The New Figurative in painting after 2000, no. 2-3, 2011, pp. 95-100.