Remains of the remains by Berszan Zsolt. Review by 2nd year ITA student Emilia Florina Joja

                     

In Cluj-Napoca, between the 20th of April and 24th of May, on the fourth floor of the Center of Interest, a large event that consisted of five different exhibitions took place. One of them was Berszan Zsolt’s Remains of the remains, held in the BAZIS  Contemporary space and curated by Diana Dochia. 

Berszan Zsolt, born in 1974, is a graduate of the University of Art and Design of Cluj Napoca, Romania. Throughout the years, he had many important solo and group exhibitions in museums and galleries both in and outside of Romania. Since 2010, he is represented by the  Anaid Art Gallery. 

The exhibition, though not directly related to the other four at the Center, is unintentionally connected to them. One might walk in the open space of it and try to correlate them. But could that actually be a positive aspect of the whole artistic experience, if I may call it that?  

Walking in and out of the artist’s space could surely be impactful if we take into consideration the differences between the works exhibited right outside of it, which happened to be natural landscapes, a subject drastically separated from the remains. 

Remains of the remains gathers a series of drawings, small and large, which the artist completed in the last two years ( 2020-2021).  The main theme of the exhibition surrounds the concept of death. The collection of drawings actually depicts the aftermath of death: distorted, disintegrating body parts that the eye barely perceives. The charcoal on paper shows the many phases of the decaying matter,  drowning in a turmoil of darkness. Some of the works show stages in which the body parts are still distinguishable, but gradually, as you go through the exhibition, they get lost within that darkness.  

These bodies are marking an ending of life, but also the beginning of a new process. They go back into the earth, merging with it, becoming one. The self is not important here, but the absence of it. Thus its remains become the subject. These remains are the witnesses of ghosts from the past, unknown mysteries that are no more. 

All in all, the exhibition has an impact on the visitor, whether he/she actually fully understands it. Watching the body go through such natural but unsettling stages makes us reflect on its ephemeral character of it. The experience itself of trying to comprehend the shapes and movements of the body leaves us in a contemplative state. For that reason alone,  Remains of the remains is worth seeing.

Zsolt Berszan's Remains of the Remains, review by Tiberiu Galan, 2nd year, ITA

Is featuring death in art still relevant and interesting in contemporary times? Or is it merely a theme exhaustively exploited and stripped of any significant meaning? Apparently, no matter how much diversity there is out there, even after so many decades of exponential growth within the Art world, Zsolt Berszan, a Hungarian artist and former graduate at the University of Art and Design Cluj-Napoca, plans to demonstrate through his personal exhibition entitled Remains of the Remains, that the range of possibilities is ever-expanding and it unveils new forms of meaning. The event is hosted by Bazis Contemporary at Centrul de Interes in Cluj Napoca between April 20th and 24th of May, 2021. 

At first glance, there doesn’t seem to be anything clearly intelligible when looking at the paintings. In fact, even the experienced eyes of the artistic community would have difficulty in vaguely identifying what is depicted. The title of the exhibition hints that we ought to look for certain Remains of remains, yet the viewer might be appalled since he’s not able to pinpoint anything figurative, a certain narrative, or cohesion between the works. Anything besides the exhibiting space itself doesn’t seem to make sense upon first impression. But the artworks are placed in such a way as to take him through an extremely brief course of initiation. 

The subject matter in itself strongly reminds of the morbid appearance and texture of Theodore Gericault’s pictorial studies, the eminent French painter, who, in a very similar manner, depicted the remains of dead bodies up close, mainly for his own artistic interest. The aspect that strikes the viewer immediately is the use of intense black graphite on the surface of the canvas, reminiscent of the swift and impetuous gestures of the American abstract-expressionists. 

An existing paradoxical relationship between the works, the fact that they are untitled, and the name of the exhibition itself catch the interest of the connoisseur. The fact that they are untitled predisposes the art enthusiast to approach them as if they are abstracts, which they are in part if we were to not take into account what they actually depict, according to the artist’s considerations. Another notable paradox comes into the viewer’s grasp. The depicted elements evidently illustrate the pieces of a lifeless body, but the texture and appearance of the palpable surface create suggest a strong sense of dynamism. Indeed, it is as if a process comes to an end, whilst another one is emerging. In this respect, the artworks of Zsolt Berszan are imbued with deep significance, linking to important aspects of nature and life as a whole -  the dusk and dawn, the transience and the finitude of things, and the permanence of change. 

The paper is treated as a battlefield in which the graphite darkens the paper almost in its entirety, alluding to the idea of earth, dirt, and the decadence of life that goes along with the process of putrefaction. Whether judging from the distance or from up close, it seems as if the artist wanted to slice the support into bits and pieces. It’s precisely this vision the artist has in mind and wanted to convey in his work. The vision of remnants of a past experience, remnants of something that no longer is, either physically or spiritually among us, entitles Zsolt Berszan as being a true artist in the sense of transmitting something universal to his audience. 

Despite making things somewhat difficult for the viewer, in the sense that it is not clear how one might approach the artworks, they embody a set of essential truths which are unanimously acknowledged. After a short initiation, the viewer is introduced to a series of large drawings and small canvases, each of which requires to be inspected carefully before any meaning can be acquired or a reaction stimulated.

Placed right-left of the entrance in the exhibition, the first drawing strongly presents itself as being nonfigurative, since the lines are so frenetically juxtaposed and overlapped that one can’t quite identify whether something is being depicted or not. It appears to be just a mere manifestation of impulsive gestures by means of using a pencil. The technique and means of creating the drawings were certainly chosen with artistic intuition since the dark tones of the graphite and the textures it can create serve the artistic intention much better in this case than oil painting. The work is hard to comprehend and it certainly isn’t aesthetically pleasing.

The elephant in the room is a diptych depicting the male and female genitals. Quite literally, the dimensions are striking for a couple of drawings on paper, measuring 200x280 centimeters. Its resemblance with the other painting resides in its formal aspects and the technique used, yet it distinguishes itself through a somewhat accurate representation of the organs. Looked from the distance, the frenzy created by the network of lines fades away and seems to give more structure to the composition as a whole. 

Overall, the exhibited artworks aren’t many, but what they lack in number they make up for insignificance and the original artistic spirit behind them. The show is properly set up and the works are placed in such a way as to bring the viewer closer to an authentic experience one might have after knowing about the artist’s vision and endeavor materialized in them. Despite being somewhat intimidating at first glance, the ensemble of drawings and painted canvases convey a significant message which we ought to acknowledge every once in a while. Nevertheless, not everyone is fit or even capable of understanding Zsolt Berszan’s creation, and,  visually speaking, his works are not pleasant to look at, and they certainly don’t invite the viewer to passively contemplate for the sake of aesthetic pleasure. 

Andrei Budescu x Obscura, review by Iulia Iacob, 2nd year, ITA

 

Between the 20th of April and the 24th of May 2021, The Center of Interest (Centrul de Interes) in Cluj-Napoca hosted a large event that consisted in multiple exhibitions taking place in different ’rooms’ of the same floor. This brought together and simultaneously confronted multiple aesthetic experiences by the sheer existence of these exhibitions in a mutual location, despite not being unified by a singular concept or title. However, the exhibition reviewed here is Andrei Budescu’s Obscura that was set up in the FOCUS Project Space.

Andrei Budescu (b. 1982) is a photographer and currently the Head of the Photo-Video Department at the University of Art and Design from Cluj-Napoca. His work is deeply rooted within the history of photography itself, with its many experiments with multiple photographic processes (Polaroid, Wet Plate Collodion, Cyanotype etc.) and many cameras. This adds to his works a dimension of self-awareness, an emphasis on the process of creating and materializing an image into a visual form. This approach develops into a fascinating space of dialogue between concept and mediality (a term coined by art historian Hans Belting in his book ’An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body’), exploring the medium as a physical presence of the image. This also brings forth a powerful idea that the (artistic) object looks back at us and simultaneously embodies our gaze, just as any animated presence does.  

  Is photography a moment of absolute seeing or, actually, the visible expression of an undertaken blindness? Do we write our own realities with our arbitrary gaze, trimming and selecting bits of reality that articulate themselves in our stories? In the exhibition Obscura, Andrei Budescu explores the tension between visible and invisible, the duality of the gaze reacting to the world and the world reacting back to the gaze, in a movement that consolidates both their natures. Inspired by theories of quantum physics that propose the idea that some phenomena are canceled by our mere surveillance (and expectancy) of them, the artists rely for this exhibition mainly on the Wet Collodion process for capturing a sensitive territory of thought in a photographic process of the 19th century that is permeated with a sense of ephemerality, fragility.

It's about things that don't happen simply because they are being watched; about the eye (and, extrapolating, the lens) that flattens events by scrutinizing them. He decomposes the process of looking at the world in multiple processes and his works end up lingering between being the representation of our own eyes and the representation of the world as it unfolds to the eye.

Using the process of Wet Collodion in capturing certain large images such as landscapes that are then transferred onto a computer, cropped, processed, and then printed on different types of photographic paper in a circular shape, Andrei Budescu marks this exhibition’s space with a suspended work right at the entrance, printed on a semi-transparent paper. This work already introduces, with the work of printed on a see-through medium, the exploration of the ’layers of seeing’ the world. The image being circular, it powerfully suggests the idea of the eye, the lens, and the world all at once. As we enter, the display of the works of art in this all-white space makes us feel as we stepped into a studio a bit after the artist had finished printing his photographs, as if he had just stepped out himself just a couple of minutes ago. Prints are laid on clothing racks and other similar stands as if the color was still drying.) On the floor, however, we find a square blackboard with nothing on it but a transparent globe that would fit right into our palms: I surprised myself visualizing the globe in Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi and thinking – this is the world gravitating over darkness. The transparency of the globe displayed on a dark material seemed like the two extremes that illustrate the way we see the world – within the see-through glass of the globe (that I would also associate with the globe of the eye), the other works are reflected, but then again, they also collapse in a sort of unshakable darkness of the matter, as if the eyes of the world were shut.

This sense of being simultaneously in a space of creation and in a conceptual realm makes the works look like both abstract and figurative ones. The play of light and shadow, shapes and the cropped images that merely evoke the world and not re-present it raise a question of what our eyes actually contribute to the building of reality itself. Do all of these mechanisms of seeing happen just because we are looking or not looking at certain things? A work displayed on a rack is certainly an image of tree branches – but the way that the image is cropped and enlarged, the processing of the colors, and the sheer association of this figurative work with the others make us realize that the more we look at it, the more abstract it becomes. We question ourselves. This proves an immense skill of manipulating surfaces and contents for the sake of immersing the viewer in the artist’s world. Observing the physical world in itself becomes, in this exhibition, an exercise of both seeing and not seeing becomes a tremendously powerful aesthetic and analytical experience.

At the end of the day, the artist’s key point in this exhibition is not offering answers or exemplifying certain physical mechanisms of seeing, but rather pulling us away from our regular way of looking into an insightful space of being confronted with our own gaze. The exhibition is both so simple, clean and so conceptually and visually compelling that it can leave no viewer untouched by the experience of feeling like he actually looks at, and not just sees the world, for the first time. Andrei Budescu is sure to not just impress, but create significant insight through all of his works so far.