Point Contemporary, Bucharest, Romania

12 June - 12 July, 2009

At 15 Icoanei Street in Bucharest a new space has opened its doors to contemporary art: Point Contemporary gallery. The first event presented here consists of two solo shows by Romanian artists Oana Lohan and Gili Mocanu. The newly opened gallery has the look of a white cube and totals 300 square meters over two floors, with a wide panoramic terrace.

Oana Lohan’s series of drawings “Fresh Bucharest” constitute an emotional map: after an absence of more than a decade, during which time she lived in Paris, Oana Lohan returned to her birth place and revisited all the structural inconsistencies and daily contrasts of the town she had once left behind. These drawings, accurate photorealistic descriptions from all around Bucharest, capture the representation of her own emotional architecture: her drawings of urban panoramas and surroundings replicate the emotion of natural landscapes found in Romanticism. Thus, in spite of the familiarity of the images (showing mainly store façades, roads and street perspectives, flower shop windows, logos and firms, walls covered in graffiti, etc), “Fresh Bucharest” becomes about the interior structures of a lonely self, thrown into an uncontrollable, monstrous and never-ending story of the world.

Nonetheless, it is impossible to scale the real fallaciousness and misconstruction of this almost imaginary city because Oana Lohan’s drawings completely lack any type of human presence, a fact that renders the settings even more bizarre and distorted than they already are. Ultimately, this lack of measure reflects “Fresh Bucharest” as a descriptive picture essay in which Oana Lohan presents a town drawn to its last consequence due to the influences of two major political traditions: the first of which is communism (a legacy left by the former regime) and the second, capitalism — viewed as the brave new world which Eastern Europe still aspires to become.     

www.pointcontemporary.com