DISCONTINUOUS STILL LIFE I, 2021,80c, 58cm, Mixed Media on Canvas, Exhibition night 2021 December
“Fragment as Essential Discontinuity”
Mirel Vieru – painting
18.12.2021 – curated by arch. Iulia Toader
Mirel Vieru’s work appears to us from the first contact as one of architectural nature. Not in the sense of each work of art as a construction of a new and separate universe, but as the result of a process similar to the one through which architects, artists of space and function, create a mental image of bringing their work to life. There is an almost functional interdependence between the fragments of Mirel Vieru, so that we can say that each canvas is itself a fragment of an opus magnum, difficult to perceive in its entirety beforehand, but easy and imperative to intuit.
This architectural feature, supported by shapes reminiscent of the sacred monster of contemporary architecture Frank Gehry, is complemented by a spiritual one that we could most easily describe using the saturated phenomenon of Jean-Luc Marion. Each piece, which as I said appears to us as a fragmentary world of a larger, inconceivable world, an “invu” in the sense of Marion (the unseen), absorbs us inwardly to the way Marion describes the invincible attraction of the work – an idol for the perception of the art consumer. We can’t see a Vieru signed canvas once and for all. The impossible succeeds, that each canvas can be memorable in itself, but rather identifiable as a fragment of a memorable world whose architect is Mirel Vieru. Each canvas is an adorned and sophisticated “idol” that represents this world, and in the sense of saturated phenomenology, “sight, captivated, becomes an assigned look. In this way the idol is accomplished: the first visible that the eye cannot pierce and abandon, because it saturates it for the first time and hoards up all admiration in it. ” Marion’s contemplation work of art becomes religious, the idol can always be an icon. But at Mirel Vieru, the thirsty look of the image is seduced by the discontinuity in the same way in which a lover is attracted by the whims of his chosen one. Any chance of escaping the embrace of the idol-painting is nullified by this “first insurmountable visible” – a visually insurmountable and primary visible field – mentally coagulated by the common synchronized movement of the canvases in this collection and by the almost therapeutic bath in which we immerse ourselves while we look.
The two components, the architectural and the saturated as a phenomenon, make the artist’s painting a particular abstract place, a “Lichtung“, where we have the unique chance to intuit essentia and truths about a challenging inner world. An oversized and collapsed domino piece tells us about the whole set of dominoes and at the limit about all the domino pieces in the real world, super concentrated in the paint spot of a gourmand and serene white. Fall – failure, but also certainty other infinite chances. A delicate peacock feather is proof for the existence of the bird of immortality, for the existence of a fascinating and unique bird species in our world, but also as a witness to the certainty of an inevitable end, or the persistence of change. Mirel Vieru’s fragments speak of hermeneutic experiences and invite us to look beyond the visible, a world that we can only guess by adoring its idols.
I also did not escape the attraction of Mirel Vieru’s idols and I hope there is no escape for anyone, because his primary world speaks in a newly invented language about ideas and theses still undiscovered.
References:
Marion, Jean-Luc, (1946, 2002) In Excess.Studies of Saturated Phenomena, New York, Fordham University Press
Heidegger, Martin (2002,1957) Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes. . Reclam, Ditzingen 1986
Works exhibited:
