Interview
Dan Popescu, owner of H'art
Gallery
by Andrew Begg
March 2005
Vivid: In
the February Vivid, Andreea Sarcani wrote a story about your participation
at the Bologna Art Fair. How did that go, in retrospect?
Dan Popescu: When we went there, nobody knew what to expect. We were worried
that we would make mistakes and wouldn’t learn by them.
You – and who?
Gorzo – it was basically a one-man show, put on by him.
Bologna is a prestigious art show –
it’s perhaps the sixth largest in Europe.
Yes, and very prestigious galleries exhibit there too. We participated in
the category entitled ‘Young Galleries from Eastern Europe’. With
us there were two other galleries from Hungary, two from Slovenia and one
from the Czech Republic.
How was the reaction to the work on show?
I guess there must be a sense of Romania being one of the last undiscovered
frontiers of European art.
In terms of image, we had quite a lot of success. A lot of the reviews said
we were the most interesting of the Eastern galleries. They coined Gorzo’s
work, ‘Post-Sovietic pop realism (laughs). It was the first time a Romanian
gallery had ever been to an international art fair so they didn’t know
what to expect. I think they thought we would be Russians, or at least heavily
influenced by Russians. That is a prejudice, but it is a prejudice we can
build on. We are not disadvantaged by this. On the contrary, I feel like now,
now more than ever, is the time for Romanian artists to gain part of the spotlight.
It’s always nice to make a profit
out of something you love doing, but H’art isn’t a commercial
gallery, really, is it?
Well, we don’t really show commercial art – but believe me, I’m
trying to be commercial!
What I mean is: there is safe art, and
people buy safe art, because it’s nice.
Yes, that’s the main market – safe art.
And you aren’t interested in that,
are you?
No, of course not. But I think there will come a time when people will get
tired of this kind of art, and they will become much better informed visually,
in terms of contemporary art. It’s a two-sided strategy – building
a market here, and trying to stir interest in Romanian art internationally.
It may take some years, but I believe in this kind of art – art that
doesn’t make you feel like a Japanese tourist.
It makes you question what you’re
looking at.
That’s the overall goal of the artists I’m representing. And it’s
the curatorial goal of the gallery too. It is more difficult for an image
creator to compete with the inflation of images in our times. Everyone knows
that these modern times are times of over-visualisation.
An onslaught of visual imagery.
An ongoing bombardment of images.
And it’s easy to be distracted,
because a lot of imagery is related to sex, and it can be an instant turn-on,
but not a lasting one. It’s a cheap and easy way of being stimulated,
but it doesn’t really make you think. You can have a Pavlovian reaction
to it though.
(Laughs) That’s basically the definition of pornography. As long as
an image promotes this kind of instant gratification, and doesn’t excite
you beyond that, then they are pornography.
What about the sexually explicit works
that Gorzo has done?
Well, they make you think. They are filtered with an artistic touch. Artists
are creators of images and they are forced to compete with television, advertising
on billboards, cinema, the Internet and so forth. How can you make a viewer
be interested in painting? The Hollywood ticket is sex and violence, and that
is what many modern painters have to resort to as well. The trick is to do
it with an original twist.
So sex and violence is becoming a theme
in modern painting?
Here in Romania, yes. It’s not sad. It just becomes more difficult to
deal with this subject in an original way. That is what is so challenging.
The works are far removed from what you would see in a Hustler magazine. They
are much more than that – in fact, they are very good works.
Tell me about H’art Gallery. You’re
in your third year now. And your personal background is philosophy, isn’t
that right?
Yes, I’m going to get my PhD in aesthetics hopefully this year. The
idea of making a private gallery was a happy event. My elders are collectors
of modern and classical Romanian art, and they wanted to make a gallery –
an unusual one. The first year I made all the mistakes a gallerist must make.
In the second I started to know what young Romanian artists are doing. And
to make a plan of what I am going to do in the future. I think I am responsible
for at least two of the last three most recent art scandals in this country
(laughs).
But scandal should be a part of art, and
in Romania where everything is still at the beginning, it stands to reason
that people are going to be shocked quite easily.
Yes, in communist times scandal in art was absolutely forbidden. Artists could
only do ‘nice’ – ie politically correct – stuff. There
were some events but the media didn’t exist so they were never reported.
Basically they were so underground they might as well not have existed at
all. They might be written up by art historians now, but in terms of influence
at the time, they didn’t count.
So anything that you do now is going
to be considered controversial. What happened at the Stefan cel Mare exhibition
you had, for example?
Vadim Tudor called it blasphemous, that on the street named after Romania’s
most famous poet is a blasphemy against Jesus Christ and Stefan cel Mare,
and petitioned the Church to take a stand. The follow-up was that the police
came and they didn’t know how to investigate a case like this. They
were saying it was a public exhibition against the national values of the
country. They were looking on the walls and were asking, ‘So, where
is Stefan cel Mare?’
And each of the artists had their idea
of how to depict Stefan cel Mare ...
The main goal of the exhibition was to take a stand against a sad collaboration
between the state and the Orthodox church, in pumping 2.5 million euros into
the 500th anniversary of the death of Stefan cel Mare. The spending of that
money is not so preposterous in itself but …
But lionising this legend is, because
he was a womaniser and a ruthless killer who was placed on the throne by Vlad
Tepes. He was a puppet for Tepes.
A critic friend of mine thinks that we have built up his image because of
the failure, and relative ‘uncoolness’ of the intellectual. Whereas
the intellectual before 1989 was quite a prominent figure. Today, however,
the stock of the intellectuals is much lower. And so we need a new model of
the successful Romanian, and here we have Stefan cel Mare. We have a word
for his type: mitocan.
And what is a latter day mitocan like?
It means ‘jerk’ in English. It means someone who has no culture
at all. Very loud, very authoritarian, vary nationalistic, something like
Gigi Becali. Stefan cel Mare is the model for all latter day mitocans. He
even became a saint. Somehow, in some inexplicable way, this mitocan has become
successful. You see them everywhere in Romania, with BMWs, girls, phones and
so on. But at every church they pass they genuflect. And Stefan cel Mare is
the model for all of them.
Does your average Romanian look up to
someone like that? Because there are not many national heroes, are there?
That isn’t the question. The question is, why do Romanian people not
question whether this person deserves to be recognised so sanctimoniously?
The art historian thinks that we have already made this decision: that we
have embraced his soul for now. It is his legend that Romania will be mythologising,
until another more worthier comes along.
