Agonal is the title of an album released in 2022 under the name "Somnoroase Păsărele" - another alias of the artist Gili Mocanu. Given his creative multiplicity across art, poetry, and sound, perhaps we should refer to him - and we will do so in this commentary - simply as an author.
Without existing as a mathematical principle, and drawing on the Greek root of the word, "agonal" can be defined as the absence of angle or angles. This is reinforced by the cover image, in which a figure ascends an orthogonal staircase, apparently leaving physical space behind, guided by concentric circles emanating from the background, from behind the body - resembling Matryoshka-mandorlas or pulsating signal lines.
In his previous solo show, Nu mai plânge Gili (Gili, Don't Cry Anymore, 2024), also held at Arsmonitor Gallery, the author built a discourse departing from an image drawn from the most literal source of the imago pietatis, generalized through works that placed the image within an iconic register - residually realistic, or apparently abstract yet camouflaged in symbol and sign. In these new works, Gili Mocanu appears to operate with a language bordering on Op Art and formal, geometricizing, structuralist abstraction - yet, as we shall see, and as we know the author, only apparently non-subjective, the same dense symbolism typical of his work being (h)ermetically encoded within them.
This becomes evident first by extrapolating from image to text, to the titles given to the works: Mirror, Jupiter and Saturn, or Family. This apparent shift in register - from the figurative-symbolic, somewhat diagrammatic style most closely associated with Gili Mocanu, toward hard structural abstraction - is not, however, a shift in register at all, the works remaining iconic throughout. It cannot surprise us in an author whose practice is built precisely on such fluctuations. I will revisit here what Erwin Kessler noted more than ten years ago about this practice: one in which, "as soon as he sets up a 'series' - a coherent iconographic panoply with a firm compositional structure - he abandons it. Any 'well-educated' artist, in the local babo-ciucurencu spirit (more recently, Cluj-inflected), would stop, consciously and with dignity, at any one of the countless series developed by Gili and would quietly hollow out his 'Work' there, in the long-dreamed-of brand. Gili, however, always wipes the slate clean." (Gilizilla, Revista 22, 29 July 2014.)
