Ruxandra Balaci
Rostopasca group and their “Rostenplazionen”
Rostopasca is a newly born group of young Romanian artists: Floe, Nicolae, Pentac, Mona, Buga, Bontas, Gorzo.
Both funny and stressing they hit up Bucharest’s boring art scene with spontaneous, surprising even shocking interventions shocking. A helpful breath of fresh air…
They make all the time little, funny scandals (as intelligent strategy). They are post-conceptual, neodada, kitschy, trendy, grotesque, pathetical, cynical, ecologists…No national specific stuff (fortunately) in their works. They are the first generation to have no real connection with the ancient communist regime, the first to live since their teen-age with mobile phones, walkmen, computers and MTV.
Dealing with hard-edged problems of contemporary Romanian life, (not strongly polemical as the previous generation - Dan Perjovschi, subReal - used to be) but derisive in a most nonchalant way, they playfully de-construct everything, humorously contesting everything, assuming underground/subversive, while nonpolitical, roles. A sense of sympathy and enthusiasm pervade their work.
Rostopasca built up a program which keeps the balance between healing and poisoning as the curative plant, whose name they bear, does. Rostopasca is a kind of traditional panaceum with strong curative properties but also toxic if taken in overdose.
Die Rostopasca meditazionen / die “Rostemplazionen” as Barbara Barsch once put it, is a dynamic, tensioned (even if there is a contradiction in terms) “meditazionen” over the actual world… the Rostopasca spirit/ the Rostopasca atmosphere/ the Rostopasca attitude is jocund, sensible, with an inconfoundable softly cynical touch. Its members are individuals with different personalities exhibiting most of the time together, in tension and proximity, love and sympathy, but also as individual artists (anyway they exhibit in a sequence of exhibitions). They use all media, old and new: performances (“Orbecaiala totala” (“The total blindy wandering”, on the occasion of the 99 Eclypse, ”Tennis” Alina Pentac’s performance in which barriers between art and life are destroyed, in which the gallery space is, again, dissacreted), installations (Buga and Bontas), photographs, texts (texts and images go hand in hand, re-enacting the metaphor) colorful paintings (a huge quantity of paintings, see their “Non Stop 24 hours Painting”, a marathon lasting a day and a night, and more recently video. Derisive of technophoria, they ultimately approach video in a crazy, non-technical manner (………..).
Castaneda’s fans, they mix global items and elements from new/age-ist therapies that promise to bring back eternity to dizzy, confounded, technologically perverted, consumerist souls. Celebrating the art game as young chamans, mixing all kinds of disconecting stuff.
Ecologists, one of their favorite motifs and protagonists are animals; the little haunted/homeless doggy (an endemic phenomenon in Bucharest) the beetle, zebras and elephants, the huge butterfly, the personified flower. See the neo-romanticist/exotic zebras or elephant in Mona ‘s painted drawings, the golden Ryno in Floe’s painting.
The kitchen-beetle became a mutant in Nicolae’s hundreds of paintings, intended as a metaphor to the painful human condition in low-classes, living in ghetto’s like blocs (a visual equivalent for hip-hop-ers). Pure fantasy, between expressionism and painted comics, childish, satirical (even cynical), just plain and fun to see and read. Pictures to tell stories are one of the oldest forms of communication. A directly, extrovert language using screaming texts in painting (graffiti like quotations, badly misspelled “slang” words or popular distorted phonetic version). Seemingly childish, in fact only for adults, because of their cynicism, sometimes sexually connoted, could be obscene but are only funny. Kitsch features and references to b.d. are overwhelmingly present .
Reshaping art as ludism (a serious game).
Childish, grotesque self-references in Gorzo’s works parodiate the idyllic. ….Every surface, every material support deserves to be painted (a fence, a car door, some dismantled furniture). According to him, everywhere we must put an imprint.
Ambiguous funny-horror game is what’s happened with Floe’s decapitated Strumpfs or with the sinister mutilated but peaceful smiling faces…, childish funny dreams turned into acid ironic nightmares.
Rostopasca behave like “les idiots du roi”, spontaneous and hilarious, pointing out in a witty-funambulesque way misspoints and crisis in everyday life or in the young human/artists status of nowadays Transitionland Romania.
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