Ami
Barak

Traian Cherecheș Creative Destruction* - An escape room
curateurs Ami Barak et Bogdan Ghiu

Cazarma U - Strada General Eremia Grigorescu Timișoara Romania - Opening 07/09 - Ending party 27/09 September 1-October 1, 2023

Vortex - T.Cherecheș, 2022, (220x160cm) - Mixed Media
Traian Cherecheș is one of the young Romanian artists who, in recent years, has made considerable progress in his professional career. It is undeniable that he has put heart and soul into his creation, and the results are convincing. As curators, our paths have crossed in recent projects, and the unanimous observation of a real maturation and a clear coherence leads us to propose this exhibition project at Mnac. It seems to us that he is one of those emerging artists who deserve such promotion. Traian Chereches approaches painting, sculpture, drawing and sound using a narrative and iconographic framework that captures the forces, which animate organic and inorganic materials, between creation and destruction, contraction and expansion, metamorphosis and transmutation and their potential for renewal. His works recycle objects through addition or division to highlight material becoming. His approach often evokes the in-between space, both symbolic and physical. Through his work, he explores the relationship between contemporary obsessions and the general public hence the title I have chosen for this project.

The multiple mutations of today's natural, industrial and urban environment are the subjects of his artistic approach, and the plasticity of matter is at the heart of his practice. Referring directly to the idea of accumulated waste, which represents the current state of our polluted and consuming society and world, the artist explores this specific cycle, proposing the very idea of art as the transmutation of waste into resources. Through the use of sound, he wishes to reintroduce the dimension of temporality and deep rhythms into his works, considering sound as a stimulus outside the visual domain, but acting convergently with it. He approaches this from a shamanic and ritualistic point of view and creates rhythms that incorporate and record his own breathing, while creating ceremonial chants and experimental music. All the organic/inorganic materials he uses are covered and unified by a synthetic skin, which creates a specific individuality, transitional and relaunching the evolutionary process. The works take the form of hybrid objects, meta-structures that echo other media, one of the specificities of the young artist's modus operandi being precisely the permanent, spiralling, often vertiginous transition from one medium of expression and experimentation to another. His works, remnants of a polluted, dirty universe that can be saved by immanent transmutation, evoke Adornian "negative space". Like other artists of this generation, he is concerned with what is happening in the world. Using organic and inorganic components, analogue and digital sounds, he transforms pictorial materiality into sculptural assemblages that sometimes incorporate shamanic sounds, emphasising the symbolic and corporeal aspects of objects. Navigating between spirit and landscape, between chaos and order, these works explore the memory of spillage and pollution while developing their transformative potential.

Like any committed artist, he gives finality to the creative world by creating myths to understand who we are and who we need to be.  It is clear that in any project concerned with sustainability, imagination and identification must be used through aesthetic and cultural means to assign a meaningful role in relation to the goals of cognitive ecology, a simultaneous displacement and rearticulation of the environment. 

These immersions in the heap of dismembered material are also a sign of an eroticism that, through violence, conditions sensual experience. And by its very plastic components, beyond the ludic pleasure, it affirms the transgressive pleasure of manipulations of all kinds.

In this sense, the title of the project describes the space occupied and delimited by the artist as a ludic place, "to play" and experience together, and thus as a figuration of the place and space of art in the contemporary world through a preoccupied and intelligent co-location, restoring the unity between sociality, matter and spirit and thus rediscovering the spirituality of matter itself through its assumption by the "human collective" (as Bruno Latour calls it).

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Nuclear Cave II (Before the not yet Living) - T.Cherecheș, 2022, (60x50cm) - Mixed Media on canvas