POLITICAL BESTIARY 3 - ÚJ KRITERION GALLERY - 2019

Of Skin and Hides. Political Bestiary III

Valeriu Mladin is one of the prominent representatives of Romanian figurative art, a keen observer of the human body, and a teacher who remains forever in the memory of those he has guided. Between the Romanian tradition of the French “school” type, positioned along the axis of classicism–impressionism–lyrical abstraction, and the rigorous, hyperrealist drawing with dense, carnal valuation and unrealistically precise highlights of light, taught and practiced by Mladin, a natural rift occurs.

Whether he creates self-portraits in various poses and formats or studies, in the smallest details, the anatomy and physiognomy of humans and animals, the artist has been working constantly, for over twenty years, strictly in the realm of painting, drawing, and photography.

After a youth dominated by experimentalism, in the 1980s and 1990s—when he worked in drawing, installation, happening, and performance, both individually and in collaboration with his wife, Carmen Paiu—by the late 1990s he began practicing large-scale painting, with vivid subjects inspired by surrounding reality. The figures are either self-portraits or portraits of close ones, painted in compact screens and strokes, with expressive accents of color added over the faithful atmosphere of the rendered setting, like short-circuits.

Now, thirty years after the fall of communism, the author of the installation Ten Years After, which in 1999 paid homage to the victims of the Romanian Revolution at the National Museum of Art of Romania, presents Political Bestiary III, an impressive series of human–animal portraits with direct allusions to political personalities, historical or contemporary. The series is openly ironic towards demagogy and moral emptiness, while the “uniform effect” is countered by the cuteness of innocent animals, who compensate authority by replacing it with obedience and naivety. The animals are mysterious, their character traits being strictly interpreted by humans, who have invested them with various psychologico-mystical-magical attributes—slippery (like the snake), fearful (like the hare), sweet-talking (like the cat), foolish (like the sheep), aggressive (like the boar), etc.

A great lover of animals, Valeriu Mladin gives them power by symbolically decapitating dictators or commanders and replacing them with their brothers and sisters from neighboring species. His approach recalls the album Animals (1977) by Pink Floyd, combined with a protest spirit that fights against the system and corruption, in a hippie–anarchic note, all transposed into drawings of impressive dimensions, executed with great technical, formal, and structural precision.

Valeriu Mladin changes conceptual skins with each new work and, through his intense exercises of observation, skillfully discharges a perennial reality, taking photographs in the imaginary.

Simona Vilău