Artist: Razvan Boar
Exhibition title: Demo Flash
Venue: Passerelle Centre d’art contemporain, Brest, France
Date: February 2– April 27, 2019
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Passerelle Centre d’art contemporain
In a critical and ironic relationship to the gesture, the paintings by the Romanian artist Razvan Boar play upon a back-and-forth between pop figuration related to comic books and gestural abstraction in the pure tradition of pictorial heroism. In getting the rapid expression of drawing just right, he finds a prerequisite and essential condition for the emergence of the painted image. And yet, he stops there. His figures seem to remain suspended, wedged somewhere between potentiality and completeness. It is as if the sketch has resolved the equation and it was now up to us, the viewers, to continue the adventure.
There is always someone inhabiting his images: a shadow of the artist, the artist as the artwork, perhaps the artist as process. This sketched character is constantly evolving: his nose becomes a pointing finger, signifying who knows what. The same nose becomes a phallus emerging from the painted surface. His hair suddenly depicts his own thoughts, taking on the form of his desires – a nude feminine silhouette caressing his forehead and brain. And among the paintings and works on paper, the artist attempts a work in volume made with bundles of over-sized matches with purple heads, ready to set the art center on fire.
