A Matter of Life and Death

Slag Gallery is pleased to present A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH , an exhibition of new works by Romanian artist Mircea Suciu.

In these present works, Suciu, as an incessant investigator, deliberately contemplates and insists upon certain aspects of the human condition; human existence is unfolding under the sign of an inescapable finitude which becomes a source of despair and part of life’s absurdity. Existential questions pertinent to angst, alienation, despair, absurdity, flow together and generate images meant to draw the attention inwards as well as to bring the esthetic to a pre determined poetic stage.

A pictorial “Death Fugue”, the works in this exhibition combine a variety of references in a contrapuntal design of a fugue with its “memento mori” recapitulation. The works are charged with deep, contemplative significance, exuding powerful artistic commentary in a disquieting voice.

Another notable element is the under painting. Suciu uses the same canvas surface to superimpose several images. The experiment rises in the moment in which the destruction of an image by repeated superimposing of others grows into a novel artistic entity; a relief on the surface, as well as a sort of history of the gesture, a memory of a failed act. In these works, the coloristic climate is tension filled; the hues have crepuscule brilliance.

Suciu notes: “One aspect of my work lies within the draw that I feel towards the expressionism, moreover, towards an understanding fed by a fragile emotional state impacted by history’s tragic side. I am an expressionist artist at the emotional and comprehension level, yet formally and technically I practice a “hybrid” art.

The painted surface sometimes preserves an unfinished aspect, a spontaneous, energetic gesture. I try to finely tune the balance between the figurative and the abstract which underlines a confliction state, a tension, both formal and ideatic.”