Ironically, painting has died at least five times over the past 500 years—and has returned just as often in various forms and reincarnations. Much to the dismay of enthusiasts of hyper-super-ultra-contemporary art—for whom painting is a defunct phenomenon—this exhibition is an exercise in directing focused attention on one particular aspect of Radu Pandele’s practice: his wall-based works. Volumetric objects and installations have been deliberately excluded, in order to reduce the discussion, with a kind of rigor and austerity, to painting alone. And this discussion unfolds along two lines: what Radu Pandele’s painting looks like at this point in his career, and how the broader landscape of local Romanian painting has evolved in light of this approach.
For those who believe that art history is a construct made up of revolutions and ruptures with tradition, this exhibition may seem like a retrospective gesture. Yet, in contrast to that narrative, often echoed in the post-postmodern discourse and naively perpetuated in the inflationary language of curating, this exhibition is instead a micro-exercise in questioning how painting—understood as a permanent and recurrent anthropotechnical visual phenomenon—enters into dialogue with innovation and new imaging technologies in our time. Behind a camouflage that might be mistaken for a solo show, Radu Pandele’s art is brought to the foreground as both a critical and aesthetic reflection on the permeability and resilience of painting in the face of today’s major challenges in the visual arts.
I frame this inquiry into painting within an atemporal and anthropotechnical context—one in which any trace of pigment left on a surface, whether stone, wood, or canvas, is considered painting. I do so because, beyond the apparent contemporaneity of the image-making process and the technologies involved, the finished works remain materially bound to canvas stretched on a frame and, in their conception, are autonomous artworks. While the subjects of Radu Pandele’s paintings may seem timely, the medium through which they appear continues to engage with painting’s eternal problems. On closer inspection, even the subjects themselves belong to the traditional lexicon of painting: portraits and self-portraits, landscapes and still lifes, anatomical studies and nature scenes. (...)
