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"30 Years of Social History: The Dacia" by Vlad Nanca

Ed. note: This article, by Kevin Costello, will appear in next week’s Creative Loafing.

Unpack your telescope and look out through the doors of Andromeda to witness the galaxy of that name spiraling outside our Milky Way. Watch a separate cluster of stars move in a rhythm different from our own, and recognize the immense distance that separates us. But the very act of observation — seeing, witnessing — helps bridge that void.

A similar earthbound connection can be made during a visit to Ringling College’s Selby Gallery to catch Traces: Contemporary Romanian Art. The exhibit is enormously satisfying. Dr. Ann Albritton, a liberal arts faculty member at the College, and Romanian artists Gabriela Boiangiu, Emanuel Borcescu and Delia Popa worked together to curate the show, and settles on work from 16 young artists. Their images are both straightforward critiques of society or ironic parodies of long established societal clichés, and they explore issues of culture and gender through a variety of media: photography, video, hand-sewn projects, small objects and painting.

In their various ways the artists reflect ideas and processes that correspond to western European and American art, but their inclination is turned at a different angle and range of emotions, one motivated — for all its modernity – by a seemingly paradoxical love for folk culture and craft and ‘60s Pop Art. The majority of these artists were only children when the horrors of the Communist regime of Nicolae Ceausescu came to an end in 1989.

Vlad Nanca’s “30 Years of Social History: The Dacia” reflects some of the lasting effects of this era. In this photomontage (shown above), he presents nine side views of the Dacia — a small four door sedan — in three stacked rows of three. The car is ugly, owned by most because it is simply cheap and easy to repair. “30 Years,” though, reflects something of the drabness of Communist utilitarianism while at the same time playing with the wide variety of colors the car has been painted over the years.

Emanuel Borcescu uses photography in a different way. His conceptual photograph “Salvinia Tableaux Vivants” appropriates a number of different historical references in his satire of an ideal paradise, among them the architectonic order of the 17th century French Baroque classicist Nicolas Poussin and banal nationalistic posturing. The image shows three men and two women dressed in farm workers’ clothing standing in a wood; two of the men hold a banner with the word “Salvinia” upon it. Salvinia is a fictious place of the artist’s childhood. Borcescu talks of “staging photographs” and says, “This is my Arcadian project in which I tried to reconstruct my mimetic childhood paradise… It was my grandfather’s farm.” He adds that in the new political climate of his country, “Romanian artists now travel all over the world and new mediums co-exist with traditional ones.”

Gabriela Boiangiu, represented in this exhibit by “Fragments,” a small torn paper and plaster sculpture of intimate delicacy, is concerned with correspondence from Romania, ripped and reconfigured into tiny colored cubes in a box. “Many artists in Romania are doing video installations augmented by photography,” says Boiangiu. “Romanian art has changed greatly since Ceausescu — particularly freedom of speech. We don’t have to do performance in cellars anymore. We see a lot of dark humor, theatrical therapy, coming out of previous underground experimental theater.”

The title of the exhibit refers to traces of memories, places from the past, bits and pieces, imprints, marks the artists find and make — real and fictitious. Artists everywhere do this, but in the new universe of Romanian art, the energy of their ideas spiral around an axis of infinite possibilities. Traces: Contemporary Romanian Art is evidence of a culture long confined, opening its doors of perception.

It is Sarasota’s good luck, thanks to Selby Gallery, to witness that transformation firsthand.

Traces:  Contemporary Romanian Art

Through Dec. 16, Selby Gallery, Ringling College of Art and Design, 2700 N. Tamiami Trail, Sarasota, 359-7563 or ringling.edu/selbygallery. Hours are 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Mon. and Wed.-Sat., and 10 a.m.-7 p.m. Tues.

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