(Mircea Nicolae, 2016, courtesy of the artist, source: Facebook)
Death has a particular effect on us humans… Even if it’s always present in our life as an ultimate, inevitable possibility, we continue to invent meaningless activities in order to avoid facing this fact… that we are bodies rapidly heading towards death.
In the face of death, we are all small and weak, with our knees softened and shaking, we lose our grip on reality and fall into its profound nothingness, hoping that someone will remember…
It is impossible to speak of Ionuț Cioană (alias: Mircea Nicolae, 1980–2020) and his art without acknowledging that he isn’t anymore among us. Nonetheless, an urge, a necessity, a sense of duty without knowing exactly why… pushes us to share a couple of words on the recent exhibition put together by salonul de proiecte in Timișoara (Mircea Nicolae. Small Things, Precious Things).
Because of this constellation of sensible people, as they are, we’re activated to energetically shout in face of death and try to make more of our passing lives… continuing to search for meaning and purpose.
We first got introduced to Ionuț’s work in 2013, when he was invited by tranzit/iasi to hold an artist talk about his Romanian Kiosk Company project (2010). The event took place in the then recently opened artist space subsidized by the Austrian foundation/bank Erste, that had animated a post-periferic biennial landscape of Iași. We were on the 7th floor of IASITEX building, towering over the ex-industrial nearby halls, remembering the local textile industry that employed a big part of the population. It was the perfect location to view Ionuț’s beautifully narrated video, where intimate memories intertwined with a concise analysis of the Romanian social/economic landscape. Honestly, we vaguely remember the content of the work, but some feeling remained with us, intrigued and envious of its sensibility and smartness. We also remember how some local media puritans had some objections to this artist film. Later that year we saw his Minimum wage (2011) video within Salon Video’s exhibition in Iași.
We cannot say that we were friends with Ionuț, even though we were Facebook friends and followed his activity thanks to it, otherwise geography would have just kept us at a distance. We don’t even remember if we had the chance to share a couple of words, even if this may have happened in 2017 at the opening of our salonul de proiecte exhibition. Maybe we should have tried more to interact with him but we were too young, shy and ashamed of our lack of knowledge. Nonetheless, his presence was always close to us, offering at that time an example of sharply articulated critical thinking within a cultural context that was starting to get more and more artificial and synthetic, or whatever beautiful metaphor one should use for the victory of commercialization in the face of thought.
We were drawn towards him because Ionuț didn’t appear, from the outside at least, to be another outspoken male artist patronizing his peers with a dogmatic practice. He had a special sensitivity, a soft poetic touch that we can just appreciate and be jealous of, since we could not have the patience to carefully mold prosthetics for a broken world. Because him, more than other, had the power of softness, and quietness, not a strategy that can bring you too far in the crowded, hyper-accelerated, hypercompetitive world of the arts, especially in this place of no man’s land, withered of public institutions and support.
For us, from the periphery of a periphery, in our naive eyes of youth, he was a soldier, carefully capturing through his art significant aspects of a “transiting” Romanian society, and highlighting the friction between the multiple flows of time that were digging trenches within the local economy. Maybe, from today’s point of view, his works are too poetic and unspectacular, lacking any fetishistic interest on the aspects of medium… but considering the present ongoing crises, inflation and so forth, how needed are these martyrs of critical art to sharply slap the face of any person that thinks one could live a life on a minimum wage.
We always thought of Ionuț being more than an artist, and until this point we live with the regret that we never had the chance to receive a review from his side. Because, more than being an artist, he was an art writer and there, inside the spaces of a digital screen, within the spaces between words, he had the most fierce thoughts. We remember that no one had the guts to say the things by their name as he did… bringing fear through his very objective and intellectually articulated reviews. Not as his frail body and sensible objects, within his art writing he had no intention of underlining the hypocrisy of being a sensible soul within this brutal concrete extractive mechanism. Through his critical writing positions, he did not accept one’s impossible fate to stay tall and look for fluid strategies of resistance / subsistence. In text he will cut and slice and say the name of death in its face.
So, we remember. This is our idea of him… and this is how we would want to remember him… knowing that if we, the people from his side of the barricade, don’t remember him, as his beloved friends from the salonul de proiecte did through this wonderful exhibition, they, the capitalist, would have no intention of remembering him and his anarchism.
