Extended Hours
Lupta schimbă gustul cărnii
With Mircea Roman
Curated by Horațiu Lipot
"Wood sculpture, which we can argue represents the metabolism of Romanian sculpture after the postwar period, is configured, broadly speaking, through two approaches: the archaic carving and the modernist assemblage. In relation to the sculptural object, Mircea Roman uses wood in a manner closer to assemblage than to traditional carving. The artist fragments volumes extracted from pieces of wood, generally softwood like poplar, linden, willow, shaping to later reassemble them through visible mechanical fastenings – nails, staples, clamps, glue – often around the joints. Roman names this method “this technique with pieces” („tehnica aceasta cu bucăți”). The volumes do not derive from a compact block, but are constituted through the juxtaposition and articulation of distinct segments. […]
[…] beyond the processual approach, wood, this archaic & everyday material, induces an archetypal aura. It is precisely this tension, between process and representation, that transgresses and marks the entirety of the sculptor’s oeuvre. […] His new solo exhibition aims to articulate this dualism through a corpus of recent works, like large-scale with iconic charge, such as (“Jacob’s Fight with the Angel”), and on the other hand, through recent pieces from his research into the morphology of materials, under the motif of the “trophy”.
The verses of Ștefan Ivas, from which the title of this presentation was inspired, evoke this state of the Anthropocene: “only cutting is an adult’s job / because pity changes the taste of meat”[…]" – Horațiu Lipot
