Anatomy of War

They do not exist, they are neither dead nor alive. They have no names, no parents, no children. They are alone for a few moments before death that subdues them, cramps them, tortures them, breaks them, makes them moan and puts them to silence.

They are bodies in ecstasy worshiping Orcus.

Exposed are not human characters but human anatomical structures placed between life and death, structures that float on Styx, spin nine times around, no one rowing the boat, around death. They are unidentified bodies visually compressing an entire series of foreshortenings, attitudes, contortions, and positions of struggle and death.

The expressiveness of this series of works reaches the viewer through a type of reading that should be cleansed of empathy. It is not the depicted moment that contextualizes, it is not that which should trigger a narrative exercise in the viewer. There is no narrative, it can be intimated, most of the time it is an emotional discharge of the viewer towards the work, facilitating a connection to it. However, this type of approach blocks the immediate visual impact of the image that needs to be breathed in, felt epidermically, somatized.

There is a type of dynamics behind works that compels one to read them at a single glance, each work has its own inertia that makes it impossible to break it into visual components because that would mess up its inner tectonics. This type of reading sends me to Barnaby Furnas’ imaginary, to a type of expressionism within which movement, violently stopped at T zero, turns the image into a frame verging on slow-motion.

Anatomy of war certainly has a serial structure, like a visual self-dictation, this series should be seen as an archive of “individuals” captured in war, a series one scans without recognizing anyone, but still perceives it as something familiar. There are no clues to any particular chronology, to the historicized nature of the war, to weapons that hurt and kill. Past and future wars are presented in an a-temporal fashion. Most works are representations of solitary structures, focused upon one’s own death, but the series reactivates a kind of collective memory of a recurring and inconvenient theme in history, surprisingly preferred most often by painters and graphic artists – The Consequences of War.

The reading of this exhibition has a cinematic rhythm, each body, each anatomic structure unfolds separately, so the spectator takes the exhibition in by mentally gathering several series of flashbacks.

Ana Negoiță | curator