This text does not aim to clarify the exhibition at hand, nor does it seek to mimic the stereotypical anxieties of a curator struggling with history. Rather, it should be read as a personal confession, with the exhibition acting as a physical support for the ideas explored here. What directly interests me is the question of how Radu Pandele's art positions itself on the map of contemporary painting. Where can this kind of visual approach be situated, and how does the map itself shift with the appearance of this mode of working?
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 history - and art history in particular - 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.
