Three Breasts and Multiple Tongues
Valery Oisteanu
In 2004, when Romania inaugurated its first-ever National Museum of Contemporary Art in Ceausescu’s nightmarish Peoples Palace, Dumitru Gorzo contributed a large painting depicting the palace on fire while two thugs knife a peasant ?a tableau based on a folkloric legend of the Carpathian mountains. Although Gorzo was among many artists displaying both humor and hatred toward everything Ceausescu stood for, his piece provoked the most controversy. Such is the task of the Romanian artist: to attempt fresh creation in a place that for 50 years was aesthetically desecrated and forced into submission before a deadly proletcultism in art, architecture and art-criticism.
Gorzo’s show "Welcome to Paradise" recently opened at the H’art Gallery in Bucharest, one of the first and still very few private galleries in Romania, run by Dan Popescu. After several years of successful group and solo exhibitions, many under the rubric of Dilit ("Crazy") dotcom, he is now the most recognizable artist of his generation, (he was born in 1975.) The opening night of "Welcome to Paradise" was preceded by the appearance of some mysterious graffiti and small pink cocoons–protests against urban ugliness–all over Bucharest’s streets. Coincidence?
For the show, Gorzo introduced a panoramic painting-installation, covering more than 150 square meters, framed with wreaths, green leaves and elm-tree branches. "Paradise" is a collection of naive-expressionistic and surreal iconography, with works titled Man’s Creation, The Fallen Angel, and Eve at Lilith Power. Gorzo’s work is sadomasochistic, campy-pop, satirical-political: scenes depict Eve with three breasts, Yuri Gagarin and auto-eroticism, Adam with multiple tongues, flying copulating threesomes, and so on, almost all carrying humorous and sexual shock values and strong colors with gestural strokes.
Gorzo is an educated man who chooses to use an art-outsider’s technique? almost a caricature of graffiti style, influenced by neo-expressionists such as Kippenberger, mixed with Romanian folk and faux-folk. He also sculpts three-dimensional wood bas-reliefs (like Little Butterfly), but then paints something over them in a totally different style. His newest installation, in his natal village in the mountains of Maramures, comprises a multitude of surreal characters, animals, and birds painted on thin metal.
"It was my intention to show the two faces of Paradise," said Gorzo. "There’s the ancestral one, which in our imagination is a moment in time and a space where man was created, and the inner-paradise borne from our actual need and longing for Paradise, from our searching of it."
