Undeniable Illusion of Pink — curatorial text by Diana Andrei
Curatorial text by Diana Andrei for painter Adrian Dică's solo exhibition "Undeniable Illusion of Pink," Arthalle Gallery, Bucharest, October 2019.
In October 2019, Arthalle Gallery in Bucharest hosted Undeniable Illusion of Pink, a solo exhibition by painter Adrian Dică. The curatorial text accompanying the exhibition, written by Diana Andrei, offers a key to reading the series: the seemingly contradictory pairing of pink tones with the imagery of industrial ruin.
We sometimes reject pink because it seems to be the color of little girls, of certain women or men of a certain age, of silly, amusing dolls, of superficial young ladies, of baby diapers, of little girls' clothes. Pink seems infantile, kitsch, a cliché or a bad joke.
And yet, the sweetness of pink reveals, by contrast, a hard, adult awareness of the serious side of our lives.
This is why Adrian Dică pairs this hue with ruins in his paintings, even though at first glance the juxtaposition seems senseless. As we go deeper into his works, we discover that this is not a simplistic series of pink brushstrokes thrown over the image of a rubbish heap or the ruins of industrial buildings, but a reflection of our own lives. We all carry good and bad, happiness and sadness, sunny summers and cold winters — a unity of opposites and paradoxes that makes our lives meaningful and rich. Adrian Dică manages to turn his works into an image of life itself, and into meeting points with the consciousness of others.
In apparent opposition to pink, the industrial ruins of earlier eras are personal interior landscapes, conditioned by the time and space of significant memories rooted in childhood. The physical structures he paints are abstract mental schemes belonging to the timelessness of a perception-based, illusory space. The artistic discourse is intimate and imaginative, revealing a consciousness shaped by an attitude of detachment and re-evaluation of memory.
Technically, the artist has pursued a certain correctness, validated by his own experience and by already established methods, starting from the techniques specific to the painterly language (oil, acrylic on canvas). He has sought to experiment on the basis of a final expressiveness. Without developing a strict, repetitive method, he integrates into his technique various materials — from acrylic paints and oils to water-based wood stains, textural sprays, industrial paint and pigments. The brush is generally used for counterpoint, while the rest of the image is built using palette knives, spreaders, scrapers or a spray gun.
The general principle involves several cycles of construction-deconstruction, addition-extraction of pictorial matter and of elements of the visual discourse. These favor the "coexistence" of experimental elements and the accepted accidental factor with an approach that is technically, psychologically and historically "correct."
— Diana Andrei, curator
About the curator
Diana Andrei is an architect, a graduate of the Faculty of Architecture at UAUIM Bucharest, with a Romanian-French master's degree in Integrated Urban Development. She is a curator at Arthalle Gallery in Bucharest, a space dedicated to young and contemporary artists. Source: Revista CARIERE
About the exhibition
Undeniable Illusion of Pink was Adrian Dică's solo exhibition, held at Arthalle Gallery, Bucharest, in October 2019. Through mixed media (oil, acrylic, water-based wood stains, textural sprays, industrial paint, pigments) on canvas, the series explores the tension between the pink color palette and the imagery of industrial ruin, as a way of mapping memory and inner experience.
The exhibition is independently confirmed on Adrian Dică's page on the Arthalle Gallery website, alongside his full artistic background: a BA and MA in painting from FAP/UNARTE Bucharest, membership in the Romanian Artists' Union (U.A.P.), international group exhibitions and painting awards received between 2014 and 2018.