Vlad Nanca
From White Square to White Cube
Art history according to…
The miseducation of…
Alert Studio
16 - 30 April 2015
[…] Marcel Duchamp [...] Kasimir Malevich [...] Paul Klee
[...] Piet Mondriaan [...] Ad Reinhardt [...] Andy Warhol [...] Carl Andre
[...] Sol LeWitt [...] Donald Judd [...] Robert Morris [...] Ellsworth Kelly
[...] Richard Serra [...] Superstudio [...] Enzo Mari [...] Hans Haake [...]
Hans Hollein [...] Jean-Pierre Raynaud [...] Daniel Spoerri [...] Teodor Graur
[...] Vlad Nanca.
***
When cholera was mapped in Victorian Britain, they soon
realized that the areas with no sewage and lack of hygiene in the bathrooms and
kitchens were the most affected ones. Measures were taken to fix this and from
there on the ceramic tiles tend to lose their decorative purposes and gain
practical ones by becoming standard in every household's kitchen. In the 20th
century, with the great help of Le Corbusier and functionalism, all of our
kitchens have been equipped with grids of white tiles, looking more and more
like hospital operating rooms than anything else. Nowhere has this been more
visible than in the kitchens of Socialist apartment blocks of Romania in the
70s, where the 15x15 cm white tiles were omnipresent. In the same decade, a few
thousand kilometers more to the west, in Italy, the radical architecture group
Superstudio were proposing (a not so different) socialist utopia, with their
flat, egalitarian Continuous Monument.
Borne along
by a fashionable Marxist undercurrent, Superstudio developed an extreme
aesthetic that looked like modernism run wild and yet purported to offer an
egalitarian utopia freed from the cycle of consumption. Superstudio’s
Continuous Monument, developed in a series of collages and storyboards in 1969,
is a vision of total urbanisation. There is nature and then there is the city,
a single giant structure stretching across the landscape. The city’s form is
determined by a geometric accumulation of white cubes — and if cities can be
achieved simply by multiplying these basic components then there is no need any
more for architects.” Justin McGuirk, icon 001 (April 2003)
Nanca’s works in the exhibition are
fragments of the grid proposed by the Continuous Monument as well as fragments
of memories of the endless hours spent surrounded by the white tiles in the
kitchen of his family’s apartment during his childhood and last but not leasts
fragments of the 20th century art history grid as described by Rosalind Krauss:
Logically speaking, the grid extends, in all
directions, to infinity. Any boundaries imposed upon it by a given painting or
sculpture can only be seen according to this logic-as arbitrary. By virtue of
the grid, the given work of art is presented as a mere fragment, a tiny piece
arbitrarily cropped from an infinitely larger fabric. Rosalind Krauss, October,
Vol. 9 (Summer, 1979)
Vlad Nanca thus proceeds
to telling a subjective tale of art history in a personal universe of white
tiles (with gentle add-ons), citing during the process for this experiment, the
names of architecture and art
history more or lesser known
personalities that he identifies as essential in his endeavor.
***
Works in the exhibition
White on white
2015
ceramic tiles on canvas
75x60 cm
Plant Stand I, Plant Stand II
2015
panel, ceramic tiles, ceramic pots, indoor plants
White Cube
2015
ceramic tiles on plywood, silicone
162 x 162 x 162 mm
Fruit Stickers
2015
watercolor on paper
15 x 15 cm each
***
Exhibition curated by: Catalin Burcea
Thanks to: Alexandru Ciubotariu, Radu Comsa, Fabrik, Nona Inescu
