Between 1961 and 2002, Florin Mitroi was a professor at the Nicolae Grigorescu Art Institute in Bucharest. During the first 15 years, he engaged (like any serious and harmless artist of the time) in that modernist routine called "contemporary art", producing pleasant works, dealing with tolerable subjects, having zero impact on life-a mere intellectual decoration. It was the ideal recipe of any impostor, who professionally claimed the vocation to reach, precisely, the pension. Florin Mitroi was a typical citizen without attributes in the communist system.
But suddenly, exactly 50 years ago, starting from the winter of 1974 and until his disappearance, in April 2002, Florin Mitroi continuously produced thousands and thousands of works (over 8000) in which the central theme was death, his own death, a perpetual suicide assisted by fatal eroticism. Figures representing the artist with a noose around his neck, with a knife thrust into his rib or an axe crushing his head and chest, or mercilessly courted by naked women with sagging breasts and sharp scythes, proliferated in his compulsively dated works, like a diary of one's own (con)damnation. Later, to the daily spectacle of his own anguishes, the artist added a legion of witnesses and torturers-foolish figures and sick, corrupt characters, stirred up by philistinism and hatred, by cunning hypocrisy or felonious carelessness. No biographical circumstances explain this somber turn. The artist was neither sick, nor pursued by the communist Secret Services, nor in love, nor unemployed. His parents had not died, and his son was to be born. Everything was as it should be. (...)
