Francesca Paola Comolli

Contemporary artists often question themselves about the processes through which the fruition and construction of an artwork meaning are conveyed by the operators of the artistic system – that is, the artist, the curator, the critic and the public - and about how far the individual sensibility contributes to produce the artwork itself.

Train the muscle not the movement is the name of the exhibition and performance staged by Ovidium Hulubei at the Placentia Arte Gallery in Piacenza (Italy) and curated by Cristina Bogdan.Through it the artist explores and analizes the logic, mnemonic and sensorial processes that  are activated in an individual when getting into contact with an artwork and that involve him in an active participation in it to complete and define its final sense. The pubblic, in fact, always plays the role of supporting actor in Hulubei’s work, playing a role as  important as the one of the leading actor – the art work – in the settings that each time the artist stages, to give life to a perfect happening within the expositive spaces.

 

The exhibition path develops across three distinct moments implying different medial approaches. The invariable features are the metanarrative nature of his intervention and the reference to the “theatrical” derivation of his performing practices.

The heart of the performance staged at the Placentia Arte in Piacenza, for example,  did not consist in the artwork enjoyment or interpretation, but in the observation of different communicative methods used by different people to describe the same object. The audience, in fact, were supposed to work in couples to try to reconstruct a geometrical shape in different coulors, starting from its fragments. Placed with their backs turned to each other, one member of the couple had the task of describing the object following some rules and prohibitions previously arranged by the artist, while the other, without seeing the object itself and without asking any additional question, had to try to recreate it, just working out the received information.

Each artwork, in fact, can be arbitrarilly redefined in the mind of the one who looks at it just by altering its characteristic parameters; for example, its shape, colour, sensorial impact, or insights due to some previous  experience.

The performance of 14th May is documented and completed by  six cement sculptures reproducing the performance setting, by a video shot during its opening and by three drawings in ink, evidently ironic, showing several tecniques to give first aid useful to “contrast the possible side effects” of performing art.

 

The artwork Waiting for Godot is composed of 16 fragments of a Shakespearean man portrait, painted by Hulubei on canvases of the same dimensions, and a video in which an actor describes the original features of the portrayed man while looking at the original portrait and enriches his description with narrative details and personal intuitions. At times he appears  to him as a “charismatic man, who lived a full life and who might have been an actor too”; at times “he looks like the leading figure of some religious creed, tired and absorbed in his thinking or in some remembrance; other times even as a violent man, probably already dead”. This work, in fact, aims at denying the possibility of a unique, predetermined and unchangeable vision of artistic images and at underscoring the influence and significance of the individual interpretation on it.

 

The slide named The Journey is the only trace left of the Rumanian artist’s latest performative action. After creating a sculpture reproducing a character of a novel by the american writer Philip K Dick, and after photographing it, Hulubei sent the sculpture to a chance receiver in China without providing him with any clue about the sender or the artwork meaning. By means of this operation the artist relinquished any authoring and role in the construction of the artwork sense/significance, totally relying instead on the participation of chance in it and of the viewer who thus acquires the role of the artist himself. Really as the curator underscored in the press release of the exhibition, often Hulubei’s artworks  “have travelled in order to be complete, yet they are not expected to be.”

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Ovidiu Hulubei, a Rumanian at birth (1984) but a Londoner of adoption, is at his second solo show in the gallery of Piacenza – the first was held in 2013 and was named The future must be sweet – and he has exposed his work in different collective and solo exhibitions throughout  Europe. Among the most recent: The Ballad of Peckham Rye in London (2015), Performance NO.1 at Clapham Orangery, in London too, (2015) and The Waiting Room in Berlin (2014). His videos have been projected in Museums all around the World, for example in Argentina, France and obviously in Italy, too.

 

During his artistic evolution, Hulubei has gradually distanced himself from the bidimensionality of the illustrations with which he had begun, to approach the performative and relational dimention of art, without never recanting his origins however.
Whether he is exposing a painting, a video, an installation or he is staging a real performance – physically or conceptually, as in The Journey , for instance– he always tries to make us think about the impossibility of catching an artwork in its entirety, in its “final” shape, disclosing instead its uneven and reactive nature in front of all kinds of external appeals – the individual interpretation mainly but also  destiny,  history and  memory.