NOSTALGIA AROUND A SELF-PORTRAIT

Nostalgia Around a Self-Portrait (An Essay on Van Gogh, Rome and the Depth of Life) the exhibition from Mind Set Art Center gallery, Taipei

This is a heterogeneous visual essay, but I describe myself as a contradictory, non-linear person, with spiritual oppositions, as well as an imperative wish to self-analyse.

The exhibition proposes as a starting point the painting at the entrance of the Mind Set Art Center gallery, which depicts a bush of flowers beside which there are two mothers with children in their arms. One of those is my own mother, holding me and my brother, as we appear in a picture taken in 1972 and, despite being a painting with a banal subject, around it pivots the entire exhibition.

The Beds are representations of the way in which man leaves a trace on this piece of furniture which is so ordinary in our daily life. We have the bed in which people have died, of the poor and banal citizen, the hospital bed, of psychoanalysis, such as the bed of Sigmund Freud, but we also have the bed retained by the Orthodox faith, on the Holy Thursday of the most important week of Christianity, where the epitaph bearing the image of the dead Christ is laid. Around this icon are laid flowers brought to church by the people.

Van Gogh is my manifesto in painting, the one I have focused myself upon. I believe there is much to learn by having him as a model of life, of confessed truth, of a path not to deviate from, of stubbornness, trust, and friendship. Another self-portrait has me depicted naked as a possible Van Gogh, knife in hand and head bandaged in a white cloth, after the alleged moment of cutting oƦ his own ear. It is me assuming a dramatic episode from the life of the Dutch painter.

Regarding VanGogh, displayed here is the large-scale painting titled The Boat, where Vincent is depicted naked, after the shooting episode, where, just like in an Etruscan sculpture, a text is written on his right thigh (the text is a quote from Vasile Carlova, a Romanian poet who sings about the importance of touch to the Great Past, to that which has set but never dies.) In my painting, Vincent is in a very long boat, where the painted portraits are placed in a very long boat, where are placed portraits done by him of simple people, humble workers from Nuenen or Borinage, of which he said he wanted to paint “unforgettable faces”. The inside of the boat represents Van Gogh’s legacy. On one of the shores we have the Creation, represented here by animals such as hens with chicks, a stork, and in the water those artists which oppose Van Gogh’s model, like Picasso, Monet and my teacher from college.

Another painting represents the tight, claustrophobic room in which Van Gogh lived, slept, painted and died. It is interwoven with self-portraits, that is, with the obsession with autoscoping and internalizing present in his painting. Everywhere, there are signs of disorder and a of death, of the rough trace of life.

In the painting in which I appear, I am represeinted painting my own portrait, while surrounded by bones. I refer to the thought of death which always obsessed Van Gogh, but I also to the vision of the prophet Ezekiel who speaks of the resurrection of the dead. It is a parable about how I want to paint.

Another room of the exhibition contains representations of a fiction about Rome and universal heritage. I lived in Rome for a part of my life, which I am still attached to because of the way it changed my life. I often refer to Rome and its archetype, to the cultural memory we inherit from there.

The last and smallest room in the exhibition contains some representations of a Reliquery hand through which I wanted to show my attachment to the spiritual model, especially to the philosophy that governs my life.

Bogdan Vladuta

April 22, 2024