Identity trances and urban lines (routes) - Cristiana Radu

FocAR Group studies lead to an art strongly connected with reality, politically and socially implied, an art not considered external in relation with society but brings forward the principles necessary to set it in motion. In contrast with the ivory of modernity of ”art for art” their works absorb in them conditions in which they are created; the artist deeply implied in daily occurence creates norms and informs society. Urban Traces present exhibition of FocAR Group has as subject identity – identity as an artist, as an individual, as a nation. The subject is one essential for our orientation in our world, complex, implying many fields such as art, philosophy, psychology and sociology. Being of an acute actuality this subject has been recently reactivated by Romania’s adhering to EU.The Mass-media productions and performances we see represent vehicles of an actual ardent issue such as integration, globalisation, localization, politics, minorities. The authors are intersted in what really defines us today, in a world of simulacra more real than reality, in which advertising assault us in every corner of the street, in which options are readily provided and identity is the definition of a service offered by an advertising agency. The real statements, the shirts, which the artists put on them are neither black nor green but are inscribed with all shortcomings of today’ssociety which they assume and show us.
The expression is synthetic, in white and black inviting to trenchant options. Actually, the dirty grey of the capital was filtered, dissolved in white and black and has become a trace, a writing in which the two rewrite the history of their own skin, in fact they rewrite on themselves as well as their own artistic destiny. Writing has become an image keeping yet its load critical and evident in the state of an explicit inscription. The film, the central part of this exhibition appeals to (and assaults) tactile sense, hearing and visual one, and associates the archaic body painting with writing as a cultural sign. Another obvious contrast is that between image and sound background, the opposed presences getting into relation two terms – interior and exterior black and white, interior silence and street noise, diversity and uniformity. The urban noise the sound background and imagistic one which accompanies our lives are the result of the capital man’s desensitization, blunting his sensitivity has become a phenomenon profound and irreversible. In reply, the images on the gallery walls, the film stills become stencils ready to be sent back as the feed back to the street by which was caused.
Urban identity of our post-modern society is completed and confrunted with the one coming from somewhere from the archaic of a zone with a specific cultural load that of the famous Cucuteni culture. Along with the question what defines us stands the one regarding the confrontation between the old and the new. The same formula of the film for documentary with the view of performance and the same gesture of applying a visual code on their own skin represent the imagistic binder connecting the two exhibitions the ideated binder being the same; the pursuit of identity, this time emerging from the past. It is revived, quite properly an archaic zone of tradition – dusting it off and approaching to it with means of contemporary art. The two exhibitions are complementary, the front and the back of a complex reality situated between local and global – ours, herefrom and as it is now.