Sorin Neamtu

sorin neamtu

sorin neamtu

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1. almost chair / retopit |ˈretəʊpɪtˈ|

2. rolling chaise longue

3. the bug

4. the dumbel

5. action with painting

6. geometries

7. curtains

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... (U): In the same spirit, let’s talk about the period of interference from the canvas surface to the object...

(SN): Ever since I was a student I had this temptation towards the object. I am a pretty unstable, I don’t manage to stay in one single story. But you see, these things are very much connected with the painting. I began with a series of objects, but in order to understand them I had to paint them first. In order to sense in a way not the geometry but something else, the sensorial quality of the object.

The starting point of these objects has something to do with my first exhibition in Bucharest, called The Great Blot. It consisted deliberately of very different things: painting, video, photography, drawings. While I was preparing the exhibition I had to go to the countryside a lot. I was taking photos from the car while driving. I was interested in the landscape,the pictures were not photographs, they were not objects worthy of being shown, but some cold testimonies about the landscape. It was a space that contained me, I felt the need to identify myself with it. On the other hand, this was my time, I was frustrated that I wasn’t spending it in the studio. At that moment I considered it wasted time. I entitled these pictures usual landscapes. In that period I was working in the studio self-portraits with myself as a child.

One of the things I undertook is that every studio thought must be taken to the end to which it can be taken. I think

it’s important to always breathe the air around you and not have the feeling that it’s the same thing you breathed yesterday.

(U): Was it a moment when you trusted painting more and then you reached it in the object too?

I don’t believe I can think in these terms. There are two kinds of tensions that answer in fact to the same questions, say. The area where I have doubts is not the object. I feel almost like an engineer there. The purpose is relatively simple. I know I want to make an object whose appearance, morphology, in the classic sculptural way, is of a lesser interest to me, as I am interested more in their way of being constructed and of interacting with the environment. I pay great attention to millimeters and centimeters, to a type of austere esthetics, maybe, but certainly adequate to what I had in mind. Under no circumstances do I read them in a belle-arte esthetics. They are not made to be beautiful, but to interact interrogatively with the body. Otherwise I wouldn’t build them. This is their purpose.

I called all these objects almost things because their design was conceived in order to produce discomfort and to lead almost to the impossibility of being used. It all starts from something that happened while I was preparing the exhibition The Great Blot at Recycle Nest in 2010. I realized that it was in fact a key moment. This thing happened three times in a row but I noticed the coincidence only the last

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time. At that moment I was working out, I used to go to the gym. I was sitting on the workout machine for abdominals. When you lie on your back, head down, on its reclined plan, you make repeated moves up and down. So when I got head down I had the feeling of a crude lucidity. I was like out of my body and I was looking at myself as if I were a man with peeled skins, the one who was painting self-portraits. I was something very mellow and organic. Looking back, I am thinking now: the lucid head, out of the body, is the one that makes the objects, and the body, the one that keeps lying, is the one that does painting. In a way. I had the idea of building objects in that moment when I said to myself that this state of lucidity that I have lying head down is what I need, this needs to be preserved. I had to make objects that put me in this state. And I wrote down then: Head (upside)down repairs clew head.

At first I started to build objects that should keep my head down. And I started to play, I kept drawing and I got to whatis now that Rolling Chaise Longue. Basically, it’s an unstable sphere that has a deck chair in it. The irony is that it is stable only when untouched. A sort of a tumbler but the other way round. I like to play games in this area, to confront the utopia. Applied utopia, put into practice, always fails. Before the Rolling Chaise Longues I made an almost chair, as I called it. Its morphology is similar to that of a chair, but you cannot sit on it. In fact, the most you can do is to sit on the ground. Hence the performance I’ve done, hanging from a wall with the almost chair. I made

different versions of it, with 4 meters high legs, or a trompe l’oeil two-dimensional version.

In that period I was doing a kind of wrong painting. It had become the slave of objects. I was feeling the need to paint,I had felt it all along, but the question was: what is the subject? What should I paint? Do the subject coexists with the painting? It was tempting to do it, maybe I had the subject (chairs, tables, the rolling, all my objects) and it was simple to transfer them into painting. But the objects already existed, I had made them. But how do you paint them? Should I make a landscape with a Rolling Chaise Longue? What can that painting say about my story? Do I go and sit in the middle of the landscape like Van Gogh used to do?

It didn’t work. I was aware all the time that I was inside an error and I wanted to get out, the same way you find yourself in a room and the air becomes more and more rarefied and there’s no way out. But I knew that I had to get out. And it was very good thing to know at least that.

Based on these facts, I started a few series of abstract paintings. But the abstraction hasn’t appeared as a result of non-subject, but rather appeared amid the unsuitability of subject with the image.The paintings had to speak themselves, the subject was obscured. So I did a series of paintings Blinded and Curtains.

english translated excerpt from the interview published in Unrest/Dosar - 09/2014 http://www.unrestbucharest.com/sorin-neamtu (web version)

2014, 50x70cm, oil on canvas

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1. almost chair / retopit |ˈretəʊpɪtˈ|

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retopit |ˈretəʊpɪtˈ|

book, 2012, 1+1AP edition 42 x 35 cm, 70 pages

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Almost Chairs, 2012 / 2013, 80x40x40 cm / 80x50x4 cm, steel

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Action with Lifted Almost Chair, 2013, 380x40x40 cm, steel

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Action with Almost Chair, 2013, 80x50x4 cm, steel

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Performance with almost chair. The failure.2012, full HD Video, 57”

almost chair / retopit |ˈretəʊpɪtˈ|

2012, frame form full HD Video, 2’52”

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2014, 127x99cm, oil on canvas

wrong paintings, 2013-2014, various dimensions

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2. rolling chaise longue

2012, 120x150cm, oil on canvas

2012, 32z14cm, collage, oil on wood2012, 59x30cm, oil on wood

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2012, 120x150cm, oil on canvas

2013, 40x50cm,oil on canvas board

2013, 40x30cm, oil on canvas

2012, 12x30cm, oil on wood

2012, 10x21cm, pencil and marker on wood

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blinded painting, 2014, 160x200cm,oil on canvas

Rolling Chaise Longue, 2012, 69x78cm, oil on canvas

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Rolling Chaise Longue, 2013, 23x23cm, ink on wood

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Hidden painting, 2014, 70x35cm, spray, canvas, steel found object

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Action with Rolling Chaise Longue, 2013, 40x60cm, lambda print, 3+2AP edition

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9 Rolling Chaise Longues, 2013, 25x25x20cm, plaster

Duo Rolling Chaise Longues, 2015, 25x25x20cm, textile and plaster

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The bug, the landscape, 2014, 40x50cm, oil on canvas

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3. the bug

The bug, detail, 2015, 240x240x70cm, 18 modules, HDF, wood

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The bug, 2015, 240x240x70cm, 18 modules, HDF, wood

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The bug, 2015, 30x30cm paper modules

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Action with the bug, 2015, 240x240x70cm, digital photographs

The bug, detail, 2015, 240x240x70cm, 18 modules, HDF, wood

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The bug, 2015, 42x42x16, plaster

The bugs, 2015, 42x42x16, textile and plaster

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The bugs, 2015, 42x42x16, textile and plaster

The bug, 2015, 50x50x8cm, plaster, cement, ashes

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The bug, 2015, 127x99cm, oil on canvas

The bug, the landscape 2014, 70x80cm, oil on canvas

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The bug, the landscape 2013, 200x145cm, oil on canvas

2015, 30x30cm, oil on canvas

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The bug, 2015, 30x40cm, oil on canvas

The bug, 2013, 25x34cm, charachoal on wood

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The bug, 2015, 40x40cm, oil on canvas

Action with dumbel, 30x20cm, lambda print, 3+2AP edition

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4. the dumbel

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Action with dumbel, 30x20cm, lambda print, 3+2AP edition

Action with dumbel, 30x20cm, lambda print, 3+2AP edition

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Action with dumbel, 30x20cm, lambda print, 3+2AP edition

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Blinded painting, 70x80cm, oil on canvas

The dumbel, the landscape, 2014, 90x140cm, oil on canvas

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The dumbel, the landscape, 2014, 90x140cm, oil on canvas

The dumbel, the landscape, 2013, 24x30cm, oil on wood

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The dumbel, the landscape, 2014, 30x40cm, oil on canvas board

50x70 cm, 2015, ink on paper

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5. geometries

70x50 cm, 2015, characoal and ink on paper

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70x50 cm, 2015, characoal and ink on paper

70x50 cm, 2015, characoal and marker on paper

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70x50 cm, 2015, characoal and marker on paper

50x70 cm, 2015, characoal on paper

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50x70 cm, 2015, characoal on paper

50x70 cm, 2015, characoal on paper

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50x70 cm, 2015, characoal on paper

50x70 cm, 2015, characoal on paper

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50x70 cm, 2015, characoal on paper

50x70 cm, 2015, characoal on paper

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50x70 cm, 2015, characoal on paper

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50x70 cm, 2015, characoal on paper

103x136 cm, 2015, oil on canvas

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99x127 cm, 2015, oil on canvas

103x136 cm, 2015, oil on canvas

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103x136 cm, 2015, oil on canvas

140x200 cm, 2015, oil on canvas

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99x127 cm, 2015, oil on canvas

22x16 cm, oil on canvas

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6. action with painting

22x16 cm, oil on canvas

30x24 cm, 2009, oil on canvas

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80x60 cm, 2014, oil on canvas

20x20 cm, 2015, oil on canvas20x20 cm, 2015, oil on canvas

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20x20 cm, 2015, oil on canvas 20x20 cm, 2015, oil on canvas20x20 cm, 2015, oil on canvas

40x30 cm, 2014, oil on canvas 40x30 cm, 2014, oil on canvas

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40x30 cm, 2014, oil on canvas

30x20 cm, 2013, oil on canvas 22x16 cm, 2014, oil on canvas

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200x140 cm, 2014, print transfer, oil on canvas

Action with painting, 2014, 40x60 cm, lambda print, 3+2APAction with painting, 2014, 70x50 cm, print transfer, oil on wood panel

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Action with painting, 2014, 30x24 cm, print transfer, oil on wood panel

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Action with painting, 2014, v40x30 cm, oil on canavas cardboard

2015, 143x107 cm, oil on canvas

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7. curtains

2015, 30x40 cm, oil on canvas cardboard

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2015, 45x35 cm, oil on canvas

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2015, 40x30 cm, oil on canvas

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2015, 30x40 cm, oil on canvas

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2015, 40x30 cm, oil on canvas

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2015, 40x30 cm, oil on canvas

2015, 40x30 cm, oil on canvas

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2015, 40x30 cm, oil on canvas 2015, 40x30 cm, oil on canvas

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2015, 40x30 cm, oil on canvas

2015, 40x30 cm, oil on canvas

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2015, 40x30 cm, oil on canvas 2015, 40x30 cm, oil on canvas

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2015, 30x40 cm, oil on canvas

2015, 103x136 cm, oil on canvas

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2015, 103x136 cm, oil on canvas

2015, 30x40 cm, oil on canvas

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2015, 50x60 cm, oil on canvas

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2015, 220x198 cm, oil on canvas

2015, 50x40 cm, oil on canvas

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2015, 200x140 cm, oil on canvas

2015, 137x98 cm, oil on canvas

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2015, 137x98 cm, oil on canvas

2015, 30x40 cm, oil on canvas carboard

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2015, 40x30 cm, oil on canvas carboard

Blinded painting, 2015, 53x45 cm, oil on canvas

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Blinded painting, 2015, 53x45 cm, oil on canvas

Blinded painting, 2015, 53x45 cm, oil on canvas

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Blinded painting, 2015, 53x45 cm, oil on canvas

Blinded painting, 2015, 553x45 cm, oil on canvas

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Blinded painting, 2015, 55x45 cm, oil on canvas

Blinded painting, 2015, 40x30 cm, oil on canvas

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