Portraits that slip out of the mind before they settle into an image.
Cezanne needed over a hundred sessions for a portrait of Vollard, his art dealer. The need to express what the artist felt had to be transmitted could not be left to memory, technique or the lights of reason. When the visual replaces the logos, it not only usurps its central position in the world but also the quality of being the only guarantor of reality. It is the moment when a potentially infinite universe shows its boundaries, and another that seems, in the language of children, “more infinite than the first”, is seen.
In everyday life, we can hardly imagine that we have to keep up with things for which language does not suffice. And to ensure a quiet life, work, family, news and friends, we do not need such mental experiments either. The Logos covers all of our Universe with excess of functionality.
Sometimes, a painful separation or the disappearance of one’s closest leads us to the limits of language. I can not find my words, we say then, and it’s not just a cliché or a metaphor.
We could talk about a language of forms expressing feelings for which vocabulary is not enough, degrees of pain or pleasure that can no longer be claimed as pertaining to the same category. Shapes and colors belonging to landscapes not found in the perceptual world. The memory of a person is not a photocopy that the brain can access accurately, even assuming a perfect mathematical visual memory (and thus impossible). It is a mixture of feelings, smells, desires that overlaps synaesthetically over the geometry of the image, and thickens some of the hints, leaving others blurry, faded in oblivion. I can not imagine, for example, the ears of a loved one separated from her smile, her eyes and her perfume.
From a world in which relationships with others stand under the sign of the ephemeral, Mircea Ciutu extracts the real. Not that of duration, permanence, faith in an eternal world, infinite and completely covered by the logos, but the one in which the contingent, the incident, the ephemeral and forgetfulness are the true ingredients of life. His portraits evade the realism of representation, they are surprised at times when they seem to be flowing out of the mind.
The position of the artist becomes an almost mystical one, that of a man who is hypersensitive to the environment in which he lives and to his own mirroring, practicing art not as a creative entrepreneur, but as a personal magic of self-knowledge and honest, authentic expression. It does not really matter that for some such an attitude smells of conspiracy.
Cristian Cojanu, curator
Translated by Mălina Mihaiu
Mircea Ciutu’s exhibition “The Head Conspiracy”, curated by Cristian Cojanu, opened at Cărturești Carusel on 15 September 2017.
The curatorial text starts from the limits of language in the face of loss and memory. Ciutu’s portraits evade the realism of representation: the artist draws the real out of the ephemeral, chance and forgetting, and practises painting as a personal magic of self-knowledge.