Posthumans - Paintings 2013 / 2014

Posthumans

The works I am presenting are part of my ongoing series titled ‘Posthumans’ which deals with the concept of pushing fast-forward and taking a slightly surrealistic peek into how society will look like in the [unfortunately-] near future. I aim to challenge political and social discourse through situations that are highly [ir]relevant worldwide.
It is my belief that a conflict [of ideas] can only be solved through violence. It is in our nature to do so. Of course, from a personal point of view (as a child of the ‘89 Romanian Revolution), that of one of the first kids to be born in ‘free’ Romania, I have grown in a society where optimism was never there, where you were never happy for your neighbor having a better car than you, where you gradually realize that you actually had no idea how to build the ‘Capitalist Dream’ as advertised during the ‘89 riots. In our specific case, violence helped bring down Communism only to be faced with a spiritually barren situation which was swiftly filled in by the Romanian Orthodox Church combined with a shallow, misunderstood mimesis of Western Culture and Economics .
But the whole of Romanian society seems to be following a wide circular time path, as now we are again starting to see symptoms of a new Revolution with people standing up to both the Church and the Government’s thirst for power (for you see, one institution cannot exist without the other in our country).
The other side of the story is that of simply negating your past in hope that you will become a better citizen/person. Leave your past and everything behind and live your dreams (which, for an Eastern-European, are not properly defined to begin with). This is my form of protest and violence as a Romanian who keeps trying to run away from Romania and its context.

Bankrupt.
Acrylic on canvas. 142 x 104 cm. 2013.
In Romanian, 'faliment' means bankrupcy and 'alimentara' means convenience store, hence the wordplay.