Tomescu Gallery to host Romanian art

The Tomescu Art Gallery will be displaying the drawings of four Romanian artists with the opening reception being held from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m., on Saturday, March 3.

The exhibition of the artists work will be displayed in the gallery from March 3 until April 3, 2012 and will include the drawings of Cristian Porumb, Leonard Vartic, Marius Lehene and Mihai Tomescu.

According to Tomescu, the drawings of the four artists makes up an important part of the practice of all four. Through these drawings the artists relate to history, their individual history and history in the general sense of time with narratives attached to it.

Among the artists whose work will be featured , two still live and work in Romania, Porumb and Vartic. The other two artists, Lehene and Tomescu, although they were born and educated in Romania, now make their home in the United States with only occasional stays in Eastern Europe.

While the four were in Romania in the 1990's, they all worked in the same studio, and were staff members at the art school which is now known as the University of Art and Design, in Cluj-Napoca, Romania.

Tomescu shared a little about each artist's artwork that will be featured.

Marius Lehene, one of the featured artists, makes his home in Fort Collins, Colo. As well as having his work shown in Romania and the U.S., his body of work has also been shown internationally. He is among the generation of Romanian artists that grew up in the 1970's among the gray concrete of the communist's tower blocks and who learned their trade during the confused post-communist transition and who now works abroad and at home. In his work, he tries to capture the cacophony superimposition and layering of multiple images that he sketches (while in a moving vehicle). To some extent, these works record a vaguely habitual reality. Included in Lahene's works are sign posts, the occasional arrow, a glimpse of a location, which transforms the pieces into fluid maps, and reorients the traveler when it is necessary. The artwork guides him through another state of consciousness, pointing out to the next road and occasioning the wrong turn, but also opening up the horizons where there is meaning in becoming lost.

"I think my artworks, should reveal in some way this precariousness proper to memory, because memory, n'est-ce pas, is at the foundation of any sense of identity...is as if my entire artistic effort is to take a bunch of disparate experiences, some American, some Romanian, (and recently some Indian ones too), and try to line-up the holes, the inconsistencies of each, as if to see through a thick stack of all of them (or put a skewer through them all; but not force it - simply find where the piercing is)," Lahene said.

Another artist whose artwork will be featured is gallery owner, Mihail Tomescu. Although he was born and raised in Romania, Tomescu now lives in Kennett with his family. His works have been seen in the U.S., The Netherlands, and Romania and are shown in galleries in New York, N.Y., and San Francisco, Calif. According to the artist, his media drawings contain most layers. His works entitled "Buried Under the Temple" and "Going Through Changes" could not only describe his subject matter but the process he uses as well. For much of his work, photographic transfers often form the foundation on which subsequent strata of additive as well as subtractive marks both block and reveal information, facilitate as well as obstruct interpretation. In Tomescu's artist statement, he said, " Christianity taught us to see the eye of the Lord looking down upon us. Such forms of knowledge project an image of reality, at the expense of reality itself" Later he remarks, "I feel I am looking at either a primordial soup or at an end-of-the-world chaos in these drawings. The work deconstructs itself but also reveals a great sense of potentiality, a belief in transformation and becoming."

Porumb is an artist who is based in Cluj, Romania. His work has been shown not only there but also in The Netherlands and in the United States. In his recent drawings, Porumb uses classical motifs such as the horse and rider, a lute-player, a temple, or a marble-tiled interior. His use of the Tower of Babylon theme is emblematic and situates his work in a long line of representations of that mythological motif from the stele of King Nebuchadnezzar II, 604-562 BCE, to Brueghel the Elder (c. 1525 -- 1569), and to the 20th century's rendering of the tower by M.C. Escher. But, in typical postmodernist switch of hierarchies, the motif allows Porum to allude, and so he does, not only to the past but also to current issues of globalization and the guilt as well as resentment that accompany it.

In Porumb's drawings it is never clear whether we look at an interior or an exterior space.

Artist Vartic is also based in Cluj.He too has shown his work internationally, most recently with Ana Cristea Gallery in New York. In this current show, Vartic gives us only a glimpse at the long series of portraits he has been doing during the last few years. His ironic self-portraits as a sculptural bust (Leo14 Leo15) make us think of the Roman busts. The entrance to the typical Roman house, especially during the time of the Republic, proudly displayed ancestral busts. He appears to poke fun at himself as if the works are a memento, to not take himself too seriously.

Tomescu noted that in the aftermath of the anti-communist revolution that occurred in the year 1989, the art of Eastern Europe entered into a confused, yet interesting phase as it confronted both postmodernism and a resurgence of spiritual art concepts materialized, most extremely, in the so-called neo-byzantine trend.

These artists' works represent that time.