Painting as a fight with the white rectangle.
I will begin by retelling a little philosophical story collected by Jean-Claude Carrière. A dog comes across a file: a strange object that suddenly catches its attention. So it starts to explore it the way dogs investigate reality: it starts licking it. After licking the file for a while, the dog’s tongue begins to bleed. But canine stubbornness makes it persevere until it realises it has started to like the taste of blood. Who can stop it now?
A painter’s occupation is either demiurgic or the mere gesticulation of a mountebank. Imagine: you stand before a white rectangle and, out of coloured matter, you must turn that absence into a visible presence that communicates something. It is a gesture of absolute vanity; in a way this is the artist’s sin, and paranoia is part of the job description. It is a Luciferian sin, punished in every culture. The ancient Greeks called it hubris, in a Christian context it is pride, and Buddhism holds that any attachment to reality takes you away from possible enlightenment. In short, the painter is on the wrong path from the start. How can you escape this circle of fire? The only answer I can sense is this: you escape either through madness or through intelligence.
The first way is that of the famous artist and his ear. Painting becomes therapy, a despair that steadies you for a while and then consumes your soul, heart, organs, brain and, in the end, your life. There is, however, the alternative of the very intelligent painter who, through successive combinations of experiments and strategies for approaching the struggle, manages to depict the painter’s whole combat with the void. There is less drama but more clarity of purpose. The intelligent painter presents us with the chart of the artist’s struggle with the world. It is a kind of partial involvement: the artist winks at the audience, more a presenter than someone living through the process.
Anca Mureșan is a hybrid case. Hers is a painting obsessed with centrality, an unleashed horror vacui. It is an attempt at structuring through chromatic accumulation, every square centimetre of canvas brimming with information. This kind of obsessive painting tries to cancel the white rectangle; it is a Proteus that becomes bone and flesh through assiduity and psychic expenditure. (Dan Popescu)
On 11 September 2013, Anca Mureșan’s exhibition Nimic ascuns (Nothing Hidden) was shown at Club Fabrica, in its skatepark space.
Dan Popescu’s text starts from a parable collected by Jean-Claude Carrière and describes Anca Mureșan as a hybrid case, between the painter consumed by the struggle with the void and the one who conducts it intelligently: a painting obsessed with centrality, a horror vacui in which every square centimetre of canvas brims with information.
