September 11 - October 18, 2020

BAZIS contemporary
CENTRUL DE INTERES, Fabricii de Chibrituri 9/A, 4th floor, Cluj-Napoca

Virgilius Moldovan
In Discussion

Virgilius Moldovan, one of the most famous hyperrealist sculptors internationally, lives and works in Vienna since 1986, after finishing his studies at the Art Academy in Cluj-Napoca. „Truth can upset us” is the conclusion of Mag. Reinhold Sturm from Vienna in a presentation of the artist’s sculptures. The hyperrealist figures of Virgilius Moldovan infuse anxiety even by their gigantic dimensions, by pictures of masculinity and images of femininity compressed in grotesque metaphors of the human body, by embarrassment in front of obscenity or just simple nudity of the other one, because the exposed intimacy of the human body is amplified be these gigantic dimensions, so the question is constantly floating in the air: what happens, if these figures begin to move? It is a reaction of the visitors confronted with these giants arising from our common cultural base created by fairy tales and myths in which the giant is always a terrible creature.
The panic caused by the imminent and unforeseeable possible move of the giants is defeated by our almost childish curiosity to discover the details that amaze us with the perfection of the execution. With joke and poetic humor, with freedom of inspiration, with dimensions of human joy and detached sovereignty the artist undermines the wide-spread existential pessimism and distances himself from a pathos and false heroism, which were too often related to human body in the art of the 20th century. These figures seem to hold a crooked mirror to us: they invoke in the viewer the sins of daily life, sexuality, childhood anxieties, loneliness, obscenity, voyeurism, reluctance and a certain existential fear, which are usually suppressed in everyday life. The more penetrating is the deeply humanist panoptic effect of images and habits of our lives created by poetry and by a grotesque spirit. The presented figures seem somehow uncertain, abandoned, hesitating, men with erected penis, women with their lost look, they aren’t at all demonstrations of human greatness and strength but oversized replicas of everyday life situations, that show us through their complexity and their contradictory emotional intellectuality something very deep and elementary about the human being.