Radu Comșa and Sorin Neamțu at Arsmonitor

Artists: Radu Comșa and Sorin Neamțu

Exhibition title: Rubin’s Vase

Venue: Arsmonitor, Bucharest, Romania

Date: November 16, 2023 – January 15, 2024

Photography: IONUȚ DOBRE / all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Arsmonitor, Bucharest

The exhibition “Rubin’s Vase” proposes a unique dialogue between two contemporary artists from the west of the country, with a completely different approach to painting and image issues, whose unexpected resonance occurs in anti-representation.

For Sorin Neamțu, with an artistic education in Timișoara in the class of Constantin Flondor (2006), drawing and painting are mediated by continuous self-analysis and self-reference, being used as witnesses to his own transformations. The painting process is studied between rational research and emotional contemplation, with a programmatic charge. Often, the forms and structures he achieves come at the end of an approach where reason and reflection succumb to a meditative effort.

Radu Comșa, with an artistic education in Cluj, is one of the representatives of the post-2000 generation. He is distinguished by his radicalized position against the iconic narrations specific to his contemporaries. Painting is a field of research of his curiosities, a kind of subjective laboratory, where the traditional toolkit, sometimes playfully, other times conceptually, intertwines with contemporaneity through quotation and installation and with applied arts, such as design and textiles, exploring and exploiting the anthropometric limitations and deviations of human visual perception.

The painting, as a meditative process in Neamțu’s case, and painting, as an anti-iconic approach in Comșa’s case, meet and communicate both face-to-face and through overlaps in a series of concordances and discords where the idea of image (shape, figure, outline) is relegated to the background. In Neamțu’s work, the form is substituted and subjected to the process, dissolving into the background. In Comșa’s work, the background is instituted and materialized into form and object.

The dialogue exhibition “Rubin’s Vase” discusses a series of recent works by the two artists at an essential point in their artistic careers, proposing atypical formats and mediums for their known approach until now. The large-scale unstretched paintings of Sorin Neamțu and the film and leather sculpture of Radu Comșa are the main axes created for this dialogue between forms and backgrounds.

The title of the exhibition — “Rubin’s Vase” — is a generic reference to the perception issues in Gestalt psychology from the early 20th century, questioning Danish psychologist Edgar Rubin (1886–1951) observation about the interchangeable and unstable relationship between form and background. Rubin’s Vase empirically signals that the mind searches for contours where there are none and often refuses to “see” the obvious. The negative space where the Vase’s shape appears is a figment of our imagination, with the mind abstracting precisely from the positive area of the two profiled faces.

The collaboration between Sorin Neamțu and Radu Comșa is an opportunity to recontextualize their work in a renewing way, often received and fixed by replacing it with that of their “masters,” the generation or schools from which the two come. The current dialogue signals that the tricks of interpreting their work question the background in an illusory manner, the invisible Vase between them. It proposes focusing on what is truly visible and, perhaps, not necessarily obvious.

Radu Comșa and Sorin Neamțu, Rubin’s Vase, 2023, exhibition view, Arsmonitor, Bucharest

Sorin Neamtu, UNTITLED, 2023, 220×304 cm, mixed technique on canvas

Radu Comsa, INSTANT CHROMATOLOGY (series), 2023, 35 x42 cm, pencil on paper (laminated), thermoformed ABS plastic

Radu Comsa, RGB (RED-BLIND/ PROTANOPIA), triptyque, 2023 66,7 ×47cm & RGB (BLUE CONE MONOCHROMACY/ ACHROMATOMALY, triptyque, 2023 108 x76,5 cm, thermoformed ABS plastic, synthetic coating

Radu Comsa, NEUF, 2020-2023, leather sculpture, 5 multiple edition