In medias res, the wonderfully taut works of the young Romanian artist Eugen Roşca (*1988 Cluj - Napoca), are based on the internal dynamism typical of the theatre and its vital principles of birth and death; and they constitute the matrix of the multiple and complex pictorial proscenium in which each element experiences its own becoming.
This show is the ideal theatre: a chorus in which there is no mediation between the tension of the gesture and what comes before it. Eugen develops his idea of painting by following one of the essential principles of the Artaudian concept of theatre, that is, integral expression, with its orientation towards the use of the word, gesture, body, music, image, rhythm and pantomime within a sort of unitary and exemplary synthesis. In fact, in ‘The theater and its double’ (1938), Antonin Artaud clarifies that the criteria by which to measure this instance of expressive totality does not correspond to an aesthetic ideal of nature and therefore an understanding of ‘art’ as a unit that is in itself organically complete. Indeed, art manifests itself as a vitalist necessity that is rooted in the anthrōpos.
Extraordinarily, Eugen keeps the imagery of his painting constantly poised between the Apollonian and the Dionysian spirits – respectively ‘shallow and profound,’ to be precise. The first shows the ‘human ratio’ that drives us to produce harmonious and dreamy forms, both reassuring and rational; the second – an elusive and multifaceted concept – indicates the impulse to life. The human desire for power, in which the relationship with reality is direct given that it is unmediated, is manifested figuratively not as something that is behind the order but as that which constitutes a union with it – constantly reiterated, and in which courtly artistic sources and the cruellest iconography are arranged together before the viewer.
Tireless and emblematic, Eugen Roşca’s painting tries to capture the regeneration of the flow of an incomprehensible and perpetually changing life: continuously creating and destroying, transcending and challenging. Condensing multiple influences – sometimes Wagnerian – it is interposed between tradition and modernity, religion and new lay claims, rationality and uncertainty, crudeness and aesthetics, discomfort and well-being.

Curated by Domenico de Chirico

Courtesy of the artist and Suprainfinit Gallery