Painting and Photography by Radu Tuian, an american artist born in Romania and living in France

Tuesday, April 9, 2024

RADU TUIAN

APRES ET AVANT

 

Du 23 au 28 Avril 2024, Galerie du Havre, 12 rue du HAVRE, 17590, Ars-en-Ré

Vernissage Jeudi 25 avril à 18h  Ouvert tous les jours entre 11h -13h et 16h -19h

 

 

 

RADU TUIAN

APRES ET AVANT

 

Du 23 au 28 Avril 2024, Galerie du Havre, 12 rue du HAVRE, 17590, Ars-en-Ré

Vernissage Jeudi 25 avril à 18h  Ouvert tous les jours entre 11h -13h et 16h -19h

Monday, April 8, 2024

Figure-Scape - 2015, oil on canvas, 55 x 46 cm



Fresh Form Fruit, 2023, acrylic on canvas, 55 x 4- cm



Territorial Claim, 2022, acrylic on wood panel, 55 x 46 cm



Fading Icon, 2023, acrylic and oil on canvas, 55 x 46 cm



A Double Face (Two Faced) - 2022, oil on wood panel, 55 x 46 cm



Darling Plastics - 2022, acrylic on wood panel, 55 x 46 cm



Mobilisation Generale (Water Shed) - 2022, acrylique sur toile, 55 x 46 cm


 





Shiftin Phase (diptych) - 2020, oil on canvas, 120 x 80 cm

 


Ace no.46, 2019, oil on canvas, 65 x 54 cm

The General Idea - 2024, oil on canvas, 70 x 59 cm
 

 

Inflated Bubble Wrap - 2019, oil on canvas, 81 x 65 cm

Redsy (Imaginot Debunked) -  2019, oil on canvas, 81 x 65 cm

Sunday, April 7, 2024

 

 

 


Exchange between
Françoise CAILLE and Radu TUIAN

around Radu TUIAN's exhibition, AFTER and BEFORE

Françoise CAILLE, art historian, author for artists and museums [Radu Tuian, An Urban Identity, 2015] - [Toyen, Absolute Gap, « Toyen expose à Poésie 1932, une étape vers le surréalisme », Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris, March 2022 - July 2022]

Radu TUIAN, painter, last exhibition in April 2024, Galerie du Havre, Ars-en-Ré

 

 

 

Radu Tuian, what is the common thread of this series "After and Before"? It seems to refer to a notion of inverted time. Is it an invitation to analyse the elaboration of your paintings and the succession of different layers that the viewer is led to perceive backwards, hence the words of Charline von Heyl* that you quote?



Yes, it is indeed an inverted perception of time, as suggested by the title of my exhibition, a time that has lost its linear character. In this exhibition, one can discover both recent paintings and older works, spanning a period of approximately ten years, which have never been exhibited before. This constellation of works is the result of a unified artistic journey that acts as a guiding thread within a formal diversity. Thus, the back-and-forth movement in time, a play between the before and the after, affirms the continuity of an endless story. The paintings then present themselves as stages of a journey, each constituting a station on this pilgrimage.

I work with images and photos that I have been accumulating for years, which constitutes another aspect of my practice. Some of them become fully digital works. These images, found randomly on the internet or captured during my "creative walks," intrigue and appeal to me. I appropriate them, work on them, dissect them. I photograph details of my own paintings, and then revisit them. The meaning of all these actions emerges in the end. When I discovered Charline von Heyl's text*, I immediately recognized something familiar in her approach. My stated objective is to build a space-time where silence, doubt, listening, and observation is possible.

*("We discover a painting slowly, in stages. What you see first will not be what you see last, and you will never find your way back—the path is already hidden behind you as you move forward." - Charline von Heyl / UCLA Hammer Talk, May 5, 2011.

 

Rosy Cheeks (Daily Journal #9), 2024, oil on canvas, 117 × 90 cm

 

 

Your pictorial work appears, at first glance, decidedly abstract, but in your paintings, the viewer can perceive or project fragments of reality. What is your position regarding this hybridization?


I recognize this process of hybridization as a creative force that stimulates change, pushing towards new solutions. It's a principle that allows the fusion of traditions, practices, beliefs, and cultures. We inhabit a complex world, and I try to find the representation that corresponds to it.

I feel close to Jean Baudrillard's* idea of simulacrum. According to him, the simulacrum is a form of abstraction. In the simulated or hyper-real world we live in, the boundary between representation and underlying reality blurs.

In my painting from 2012 entitled "Saeco Reefs, you're just an empty shell," one can see an anthropomorphic element, a shape reminiscent of a broken sword, flying pieces, a ladder, etc. This is like child's play for me. The evoked images are not meant to tell a story. They are fragments of reality interacting, pictorial objects, empty shells, bacteria, or viruses that define a state of mind, perhaps unease.


*(Jean Baudrillard develops his theory of the simulacrum in his work entitled "Simulacra and Simulation" published in 1981. It is in this book that he asserts that the simulacrum can be considered as a form of abstraction.)


Color is sometimes background, sometimes form, sometimes trace, often less foundational to the image than the line, which produces movement. Can you describe how the image is structured when it emerges on the canvas?

I often start with the end and look for my starting point. I assert pictorial elements that should be in the foreground by pushing them into the background. I delve into the background of the painting and bring back vestiges to the surface of the canvas. I don't create; I discover in the practice of painting. My visual subjects are born like this, in a "slow action painting" made of action and contemplation. The line produces movement, indeed. The thicker the line, the more it becomes a form. I let the canvas find its logic, follow its path. If I impose a form, a color, it's to give a new impetus to the painting, to create a new dynamic, the classic "Push and Pull" that Hans Hofmann* talked about in the 1940s and 1950s.

*(Hans Hofmann was a German-born American painter and influential art teacher. He is known for his contributions to abstract expressionism and for his teaching methods. Hofmann developed his theory of "push and pull" while teaching at his art schools in both Germany and the United States. He believed that the illusion of depth and space in a painting could be achieved by the interaction of colors and shapes, pushing some elements forward while pulling others back. This theory emphasizes the dynamic interplay between colors, forms, and spatial relationships within a composition, creating a sense of movement and depth.)

 

How does your connection to nature intervene in your work? Does it play a role in the creative process, or is it anchored more in form, colour, material, gesture?

The opposition between nature and culture loses its relevance in a hybrid world. I live near the sea, between the island of Ré in France and the island of Favignana in Sicily. The sea is a tangible reality in my life, plastic and chemicals dumped by humans unfortunately are part of it. This is a concrete example of "nature" that inspires me. I am not inspired by an ideal world that does not exist, nor by the superficial well-being that obsesses us, as if denial could save us from upcoming conflicts or from the ongoing climate collapse. Then, to answer your question, all you have to do is get to work, which happens in form, color, material, gesture...


The titles of your paintings seem to evoke images. At what point do they impose themselves on you? Do they have a real connection, in your mind, with the representation, or are they rather linked to an emotion, a memory, a later look that you place on the created work?

My titles are personal notations. They are there to complicate the task, to mislead us. The logic of painting is not the same as that of speech. Painting has its own logic, and we follow it rather than imposing rules on it that are foreign to it. We propose possible paths, we come with our heads full of ideas, but if we don't listen to what the painting wants of itself, we are quickly lost. It's a bit like the conquistadors lost in the Amazon jungle in Werner Herzog's film, Aguirre, the Wrath of God.


Two paintings (Juno Lark’s Slumber and Lark’s Slumber) present a cross shape. Is it for you a simple formal interest that imposed itself, or is it the cultural symbol that prevailed, the sleep evoked in the title then being that of death?

It's simply a formal interest! I was looking for centrality, and today I seek the periphery, the margin, the frontier. The dialectic between interior and exterior is a real subject for me. I must add that the central symbol you speak of in my painting is there to be deconstructed or multiplied. Everything is multiple and simulacrum in this painting. Only sleep endures, indeed.

(J.L.S.) Juno-Lark’s Slumber –2020, acrylic and oil on canvas, 176 x 148 cm

 

 

Eros Selavi is of course a nod to Marcel Duchamp's work, Rrose Selavy, a pun that means nothing other than "Eros is life." Red then takes on a strong meaning here. Was Duchamp an inspiration for you, and how did this influence act as he himself abandoned painting? Is this work a tribute that you pay him?

Yes, it's a sensual painting: the central form, the lace, the tiger skin motif... The nod to Duchamp is obvious. He was interested in questioning artistic and linguistic conventions. When I say that I start with the end, it has a personal meaning: I began my life as an artist at 20 by abandoning painting. I was interested in photography, objects, conceptual art, installation. I resumed and abandoned painting several times in my life. This circular movement around a center of interest characterizes me.


This nod to Duchamp influences my perception of the painting Rosy Cheeks, because in 1959, he made a work entitled With my Tongue in my Cheek, which means "At the second degree." Did you think about it?

No, I regret to say I didn't think about it. However, I regret it because it fits well with my vision of the painting as you present it. The notion of second degree of modernism is another formative element of my own artistic approach. Duchamp fascinated me, and he fascinates me even more today in the context of the Moderns that Bruno Latour talks about to define the world of before. Duchamp is the epitome of modernity, the enfant terrible of modernism. Latour talks about the Modern by representing it as a character with a forked tongue, speaking at both the first and second degrees at the same time, a trickster. Bruno Latour talks about a world of before, characterized by the separation of nature and culture, the separation between facts and values, and total trust in progress and scientific rationality; and the world we live in today is of a complex and interconnected reality, a hybrid world. We find ourselves plunged into post-post-post-post-Modernism, therefore at the Xth degree compared to the initial second degree, Duchamp's "tongue in cheek." (A world where the first degree is covered by the second degree, then the whole covered by an infinite number of degrees simultaneously, so there we are in painting.) In my 2022 painting, Two Faced, I deal with the duality of appearances.


(Bruno Latour - "We Have Never Been Modern: An Essay in Symmetrical Anthropology" and - "Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns")


 

Two Faced, 2022, acrylic on wood, 55 ×46 cm

 

 

 

 

You say you're inspired by nature, or rather by representations of nature (photos, images). Do you not have other sources of inspiration, such as literature, as suggested by the title Brave New World, an allusion to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World?

Everything inspires me! I was born into a society as Aldous Huxley describes in his dystopian novel Brave New World. Utopianism is the driving force of humanity, such as going to Mars, but it's also destructive in terms of human lives, like the ongoing wars today were glorious fictions, “story-tellings”, clash until death.

I must add at the end that I'm not structured in terms of ideas, of thought. I jump from one thing to another with a disconcerting nonchalance. I don't claim to be an intellectual; I'm a painter who is interested in the world he lives in. I'm made up of fragments, of snippets of realities (as you mentioned in one of your previous questions), of pieces of different constitutive cultures that I try to piece together, to unify. This characterizes my work as well. The Japanese have made an art of piecing together broken pieces with precious metal wire, Kintsugi. The fractures, the fissures have become scars that confer a new beauty on the object.


In a three-dimensional work from 1985, I used a crude bolt to force together, like impaling on a barbecue skewer, a piece of granite and a photo of the Wheel of Fortune with a surface painted in Klein blue beside it. I was trying to amalgamate incompatible elements, but I still thought in dichotomous terms characteristic of modernism. The transition from one world to another was laborious for me. Literally, the passage from the Old World to the New World, from my native Romania to the United States, from East to West. The fall of the wall was the passage to the world of today, this interesting world we live in. "May you live in interesting times" is a Chinese curse and the title of the 2019 Venice Biennale.

 

Wheel of Fortune, 1989, granite, steel, photography and blue pigment on wood,

60 x 60 ×30 cm