January 4, 2012 |
Ghenie’s intensely layered, textured canvases conjure up dark, enclosed spaces, underground cellars, bunkers or wooden boxes, where ghosts from history or family memories, lurk. The Romanian artist was born into Ceausescu’s oppressive regime, and his work excavates the traumas of Europe’s past. “I was pretty young at that time,” he recalls, “but I remember people’s mood and their reserved attitude towards almost everything. I lived in two totally opposite worlds – hardcore communist Romania followed by schizophrenic capitalist Romania – as a cultural experience that probably gave me the awareness of history reflected in my work.”
Like many painters, Ghenie works with photographs and images found online, but he also builds models, translating these images into three dimensions before transforming them again in his hallucinatory paintings. “I’m very interested in the tri-dimensionality of the paintings and the models help with that,” he says. “I often use images that I find randomly on the Internet or in books, but I’m interested especially in images that are loaded with an emotional tension, images that are part of known archives and therefore part of our collective memory. I like to take those images and highjack their meaning, making something else that is new and surprising and maybe uncanny but still strangely familiar. The historical archives are a starting point. I mix these images with others in order to create a surprising contrast, a tension, a disturbing daydream.”
On the one hand Ghenie’s works depict history’s anonymous masses with faces shrouded or deformed in Bacon-esque painterly shrieks, though they also call up major players. In his earlier painting The Nightmare, from 2007, for instance, the little man with his back to us is Hitler, watching over the artist as he sleeps. “I try not to be judgmental when I approach these epic figures,” he explains. “Let’s say they’re the ‘main actors’ in this gigantic stage called the collective subconscious. I relocate them in new sets. The Nightmare is a good example. Hitler in my room next to my bed reveals something human about him, almost a weird tenderness and this make the whole scene more scary them other images of him, shouting on the microphone or with his generals – the scariest thing about theses malefic ghosts is to realise even for one moment, that they were people like you.”
by Skye Sherwin
