I need to start by saying that Gili Mocanu's painting has always evoked a constant fascinationin me, one that is difficult to communicate, how it happens, and how I get to the heart of the matter. In truth, there still are threads in the artist's work I haven't unwound, even after giving it considerable analysis, tying it to this or that theory in contemporary visuals that could open multiple interpretations, or could just as easily close them off, and refuse the penetrating and discerning gaze. Something in Gili's painting always manages to slip between our fingers, to dodge even our sharpest hermeneutical instruments, as if to show us, again and again, the painting's autonomy, and that of its living, unbound body, always win.
After visiting the mini-retrospective Deal cu craniu [Hill with Skull], I'm again left with the feeling that his art is a sort of a creature too large for the aquarium of the exhibition space. The show is curated by the artist's long-time partner in dialog Mihnea Mircan, orchestrated by Ars Monitor Gallery. The works in the mini-retrospective trace an arch over time and show us a Gili composed of several artists, all of them striving to occupy, plot by plot, new territory in painting. From the formative matrix of a textually defined visual field, Consonantand Vowel (2006), to the archetypal paintings of the mid-2000s, to more recent works, such as Revera, 2020-2024, all the paintings exhibited carve out the path that Gili has been making for himself, without the anxieties of an occupier whose expansion determines his ego stability. Gili plunges into the abyss of creation - no safety net, no festive turn of events -and in searching for both the primordial creator of all things and the lost Hermes, who was there for mankind's first creations and bound the earth to transcendence, the artist calls for quiet and stillness through the noise of everyday life. (...)
