I can't quite resist the temptation, when writing about Gili Mocanu, to begin by saying what his work is not-perhaps because I am simply unable to pin down what it is right off the bat. It is not narrative in any straightforward sense. I would not call it abstract in any pure or doctrinaire way, though abstraction is clearly one of its primary operating conditions. It is not symbolic in the decodable manner that symbolism or iconography usually promises, where one sign unlocks another, and everyone goes home pleased with themselves. Nor does it sit comfortably inside the familiar binaries that still structure too much writing on contemporary painting: figuration versus nonfiguration, image versus text, expression versus system. The point, of course, is that Mocanu's work has spent the better part of two decades making those categories look increasingly flimsy-and any writing attempting to pin it down is likely to wobble a little too. Yet here goes.
Born in Constanţa in 1971 and based in Bucharest, Mocanu belongs to the generation of Romanian artists who emerged after 2000 and decisively complicated the field of painting in the region. He was part of deInterese, one of the key artistic formations of its moment and an antecedent to the gallery Posibila. Yet his position has always remained somewhat singular, refusing to become a representative case study of that generation. I would argue that his artistic quest is too internally driven to become that; too formally erratic in the best sense, too elusive, too resistant to becoming exemplary of anything beyond its own peculiar logic. Add to that his parallel activities as a poet and as an electronic musician, and the contours of the practice become clearer: Mocanu's painting is fed by compression, rhythm, fragmentation, vibration, recurrence, and a coded intensity that exceeds the pictorial field. (...)
