A Dobrudjan village, a square seed.
Aurel Cogealac is in fact Aurel Gheorghiu, born in 1967, lives and works in Cogealac, Romania. That is how all artist presentations begin. It is a stereotype that for a long time seemed to me a mere, slightly embarrassing formality, something that sounded better in English because it assumed there was still a cultural centre of the world, where English is spoken. This is one of the few times when the phrase says more and gives us extra insight into the present exhibition.
Cogealac is a village in Dobrudja, a dry, dusty place, an antechamber of the sea, which it foreshadows in ochre-mustard distances soaked in the azure horizon. Aurel lives in his parents’ house; he is a farmer, has a greenhouse where giant tomatoes grow and raises multicoloured Brahma roosters as big as two cats, their legs covered in feathered trousers. He returned to the countryside a few years ago after a long stint in Bucharest, where he painted for more than ten years. He is an artist on whom the paideuma of his birthplace leaves its seal and imprints his style. From Bucharest he came back with an artist’s name, Aurel Cogealac, and often jokes that had he been born in Bucharest it would have been grotesque to call himself Aurică București; it would sound like the name of a manele singer or a church hierarch. The luck of a small native village-town, like Vinci or Mirandola, makes it possible to take the birthplace into one’s own name.
The exhibition you are walking through samples three aspects of the Cogealac artist’s work. First we notice three works made around 2007, during his Bucharest years. Each is a sequence of urban scenes with a more or less autobiographical reach. The figures are barely sketched, the atmosphere is one of depersonalisation, a teeming, worm-like life inside a giant honeycomb. In the middle room there are four recent works in which an appetite for the organic and vegetal is the obsession at play. Finally, in the main room, Cogealac shows the series of drawer-boxes and insect cases, where everything starts from a drawing that works like a seed, while the small rectangular compartments wrap the core in an outer pulp. The objects stored in these small rectangular compartments work like stamp albums, a way of cataloguing, separating, isolating and keeping memories. The things on display belong first of all to the author’s memorabilia, but some were rescued from the village’s communal rubbish dump. It should be said that in traditional villages all waste was used: it became fertiliser, firewood or material for later DIY. The rubbish dump is a contemporary phenomenon, just as the art market is a place of cultural surprises and anti-natural toxicity.
Since I promised myself long ago that each time someone shows at H’art I would talk about something new I have learned about art, I will do so for Aurel Cogealac too. It is an idea about the shape a “seed” takes. When it has to germinate biologically, a seed is a derivative of the circle as elementary form. Seeds of the horticultural kingdom and beyond, probably everything alive, germinate from a circle by fracturing that circle. Rupture and symmetry are then the thesis and antithesis through which a new organism will synthesise its own individuation.
In the inner human order, the “seed” is not spherical but square-cubic. The shape of the mind through which we cut out, understand and know everything is the square. The initial intuition is, obviously, the right angle. It is unnatural, the result of a transgression made by man, the only one able to live in and be aware of two planes of existence (two-dimensional and three-dimensional). The sentence above may seem hermetic, but it is enough to imagine having to invent the right angle with only organic things to hand. This is possible only by folding a plane twice. The traces left by this folding will result in the 90-degree angle. From here the construction of the world can begin again. (Dan Popescu)
This project is part of the programme supporting Bucharest art galleries initiated by the Bucharest City Hall through the General Directorate of Landscape Architecture and Public Monuments and the Expo Arte Cultural Centre.
Aurel Cogealac’s exhibition Lucrări vechi și noi (Old and New Works) opened at H’art Gallery on Bucharest Gallery Night, 4 October 2020, with an opening on 6 October and a closing event on 10 November. The works spanned 13 years of the artist’s practice; he lives and works in the village of Cogealac, in Dobrudja.
Three rooms, three facets: urban scenes painted around 2007, during his Bucharest years, four recent works obsessed with the organic and vegetal, and the series of drawer-boxes and insect cases in which kept objects, some rescued from the village dump, are filed away as memories. Dan Popescu links these compartments to the right angle, the square shape of the mind.