Aeroplastics is delighted to present Black Milk, Romanian artist Mircea Suciu's first solo exhibition with the gallery. The title of the exhibition is derived from Paul Celan’s poem, ‘Death Fugue’, published in 1948 and considered one of the great works written by a holocaust survivor.  The poem describes how prisoners are forced to dig graves while others play music. The macabre practice of forcing prisoners to ‘perform’ in the run up to a terrible event such as a mass execution (as often happened in Auschwitz), was referred to by prisoners as the ‘Death Tango’. Celan’s text originally held this title and this information is significant both when considering Suciu’s works for this exhibition, and the motivation behind his practice.

Black Milk is comprised of a series of mostly large scale, charcoal drawings. Like a great deal of Suciu’s works, the drawings are dark: both physically and in terms of the atmosphere they convey. The figures in Suciu’s drawings often appear trapped in some kind of routine or performance. It’s not unusual for artists to create a composition after a dance and indeed if we choose to interpret the work in this way we come closer to discovering the artist’s keen awareness of what he describes as ‘man’s tragic destiny’, with each individual playing out his part in a pre-ordained drama, like dancers in a ballet.

(text source: Aeroplastics)

Mircea Suciu, 'cleaning day', 40/40 cm, 2007, oil on canvas; Courtsey Galerie Mie Lefever

More about  Mircea Suciu (b. 1978, Romania)

Though Suciu turns often to the middle of the 20th Century for inspiration, he is very much a 21st Century artist, ‘finding’ objects through contemporary sources such as the internet, photographs and other current media. Continuing a line from Duchamp’s ‘object trouve’ to, in his case ‘image trouve’, Suciu builds dramatic compositions that function on very different levels. Sometimes they are deceptively simple, featuring a lone figure set against a flat background, at other times they might be peopled so intensively as to create a work that is almost unreadable in a narrative sense. In the latter, the work becomes about the shapes and tones; concerned with the tropes of abstraction and optic effects, rather than ‘the story’ in any conventional sense. This, one feels, is when Suciu becomes overtaken by both his love of the medium, and the moment itself. The subject is dark, but the drive to create is overwhelming.

(text source: Aeroplastics)

Education:  BFA, Cluj Visual Arts University in Painting, Cluj Napoca, Romania, 2003.

Further information here...(ArtSlant Profile) (Gallery)

(Image on top right: Mircea Suciu, Parable of the blind, 2012, Charcoal on paper, 150 x 148 cm; Courtesy of the artist and Aeroplastics contemporary, Brussels)