Tracing Journals

Slag Contemporary is pleased to present TRACING JOURNALS, a 
two-person exhibition of the works by artists Dumitru Gorzo and Tudor Mitroi. 

Both artists synthesize complex forms by a cultivated use of traces, gestures, color and treated irregular surfaces in order to address the layers that structure their own identities. The use of journals, maps and characters point to the constitutive and formative elements of their identities that might seem scattered, but that have been reorganized to open a process of recognition.

Dumitru Gorzo has a Post-Graduate Diploma in Advanced Studies in Plastic Arts from the University of Arts, Bucharest, Romania. He is also co-founder of the artist group and movement Rostopasca, the most influential artist group in Romania for the last decades. This multifaceted artist has worked with a variety of mediums and materials. In this body of work, Gorzo functions not without a sense of humor. Through strong and essential traces the characters portrayed in the works renegotiate the present readings with and the ephemeral past. Once more we see the artist’s compromise with the honesty of aesthetics, and to the search of new technical processes that results in the compelling sculptural qualities that we can see in this exhibition. Gorzo currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Tudor Mitroi currently lives and works in Houston, TX. He holds an MFA in Painting/Drawing from the University of North Texas. Mitroi's work is based on his lifelong interest in maps and documentary images, a preoccupation that he has been cultivating since he first, as he puts it, “lovingly vandalized” his grandfather's turn-of-the century atlas. This initial gesture of “cultural vandalism”, of outlining territories and delimiting borders with a black pen evolved in search of a personal cartography. His works are aerial views that combine a personal experience and the physical detachment of the site, of the uncharted territory. These experiences are reinterpreted and portrayed in Mitroi's work. Works like “Red Earth Journal” and “Golden Earth Journal” communicate spatial information of a site and partially reveal the mapped objects and their traits. The sites mapped in these works are always lingering in the viewer's mind between a tangible landscape and as an abstract idea. A layering of lines, traces, numbers and fields of color point to public places as specific as Bucharest, and Tomkins or reference to private spaces such as the artist's house.