The subject. Edges and bounds.

Sorin Neamţu has always been lured toward the object. Existing objects that
had to be painted in order to be understood, not in their geometry, but in
their sensual quality. Objects that contain the painter inside,
landscape-objects. After that, constructed, invented objects, less
interesting after they are finished than during their careful crafting. An
almost impossible stake, and Sorin Neamţu, almost denying those objects any
- in a classical sense - sculptural value, subjects them to a series of
troublesome tests in order to bring the objects back to the metamorphic state
previous to their execution. A state of an indecisive relation between the
object and the environment or between the object and the public/author/user.
These objects are called almost things because their design was conceived in
order to produce discomfort and to lead almost to the impossibility of being
used.

This uncertainty in relating with his own objects lead Neamţu on the path of
painting the wrong paintings. Paintings that raise the question: What is the
subject? What is to be painted? The objects are there, created by the artist
himself, but are they to be painted? Should the objects be transported into a
landscape and painted there?

"It didn’t work. I was aware all the time that I was inside an error and I
wanted to get out, the same way you find yourself in a room and the air
becomes more and more rarefied and there’s no way out. But I knew that I
had to get out. And it was very good thing to know at least that. Based on
these facts, I started a few series of abstract paintings. But the
abstraction hasn’t appeared as a result of non-subject, but rather appeared
amid the unsuitability of subject with the image. The paintings had to speak
themselves, the subject was obscured. So I did a series of paintings Blinded
and Curtains". (Sorin Neamţu)

Sorin Neamtu is a Romanian artist, born in 1977.

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When it comes to painting, I am concerned about what happens within its fixed
bounds. I do not care to get out, but to stay there. To seek new forms,
vocabulary, that would take me aback, get me out of my natural habitus –
indolence – and hype me up.

In this sense, the type of painting I’m practicing has a performative
nature (jazz) – the current gesture is spontaneously generated by the
previous one. Provided that, for example, I already have a stain, what comes
after is a new stain or a line complying to the original. The form I begin
with is quasi-random or, if not random, it is something: an image, a subject
to be denied, hidden, because it might have already failed me.

The fact that the image is abstract allows me to express a state that I
couldn’t set forth in words. It leaves me diluted into the waters of
thinned thoughts, snatches of ideas, sensations. The today’s sunny tarmac
path I am walking on seems different from yesterday. Stepping with my shoe
(which is, again, not the same as yesterday) on a tarmac makes me believe
that I belong to something that is radically shaping myself. This might be
the state I try to invoke here.

But my studio-painting is neither an depiction of a sunny tarmac, nor a
pathetic/abstract "self-portrait". It is the whole amount of scraps of
thoughts that otherwise - through text, words - could not become discourse. A
kind of enormous elastic sphere which moves inside clearly defined structures
(walls), leaving traces of her skin and bounds on their surface.

Sorin Neamtu

Supported by Slovak Arts Council.