Adrian Ghenie
Adrian Ghenie is a young Romanian painter whose works demonstrate his fascination with history and the trauma of dictatorship. The sources for his images are derived from a combination of his own personal memories and from historical books, archives and both documentary and fictional film.
Ghenie plunders visual history via disparate avenues - archives, history books, cinema, painting, YouTube and Google - to build his dense, multi-layered paintings. His preparations are intriguing in their ebb and flow between fact and fabrication. Once images are selected from different modes of representation, Ghenie creates collages with printed images that are overworked and embellished in paint. Sometimes he turns stills into cardboard models, creating a kind of mini film set, tangible, with shifting light and relative scale.
Cinema’s aesthetic preoccupies Ghenie, particularly the moment cinema developed its own unique qualities: when scenes were created, seen and understood as nothing but filmic – movement, light, structure, genre, and moments repeated in different productions to the point of cliché that could not be separated from that medium, just as the surface and qualities of a Caravaggio can only really exist in paint.
His diptych Nickel Odeon 2008 turns an inherently cinematic construct into painting. Its characters, Laurel and Hardy, became instantly recognisable through attribute and gesture rather than plot or character: underweight, overweight, hair, moustache and hat – the modern equivalent of a saint or icon in a medieval painting. Merged with one of Velasquez’s courtroom buffoon paintings, here the comedians arrive not from a classic film, but from one of their last, private, appearances, both shadows of their former selves after serious illness. Rejecting a depiction of them in their classical guise, Ghenie further ponders the construction of memory through the visual and the creation of contemporary cliché.
Cinema’s aesthetic preoccupies Ghenie, particularly the moment cinema developed its own unique qualities: when scenes were created, seen and understood as nothing but filmic – movement, light, structure, genre, and moments repeated in different productions to the point of cliché that could not be separated from that medium, just as the surface and qualities of a Caravaggio can only really exist in paint.
His diptych Nickel Odeon 2008 turns an inherently cinematic construct into painting. Its characters, Laurel and Hardy, became instantly recognisable through attribute and gesture rather than plot or character: underweight, overweight, hair, moustache and hat – the modern equivalent of a saint or icon in a medieval painting. Merged with one of Velasquez’s courtroom buffoon paintings, here the comedians arrive not from a classic film, but from one of their last, private, appearances, both shadows of their former selves after serious illness. Rejecting a depiction of them in their classical guise, Ghenie further ponders the construction of memory through the visual and the creation of contemporary cliché.
