Group Exhibitions
"Polished Honesty"
Lateral ArtSpace at CAV Multimedia Center, Bucharest, Romania
2016
If there is a word that would describe the contemporary man, that would be ”busy”. Making stuff, seeing places, meeting interesting people, basically accumulating experiences, this is what we MUST do. The system we live in exerts this pressure (not the world). But that has been going on for quite some time. Man apparently needs to be constantly reminded what to do and not to do, think, feel and ultimately love.
Almost every cultural project intended for the greatest public consumption is about love, be it literature, music or cinema. But then don't we live the lives of others, performing a love game like some preprogrammed machine, from love declarations to gifts and acts, from how we look to how we behave. Do your best, be your best, have your best body, your best career, have the best time of your life, over and over, day after day. But this polished reality that we project and perceive on social networks is it really honest?
Ortega y Gasset thought love to be an ”abnormal attention fixated upon a certain person”. And by abnormal he meant by one that you cannot escape, like a magnetic field from whose orbit, once entered, you cannot but gravitate around. Studies have found love to be linked to the caudate nucleus, where are the most neurotransmitter for dopamine ”which in the right proportions, creates intense energy, exhilaration, focused attention, and motivation to win rewards. It is why, when you are newly in love, you can stay up all night, watch the sun rise, run a race, ski fast down a slope ordinarily too steep for your skill. Love makes you bold, makes you bright, makes you run real risks, which you sometimes survive, and sometimes you don't.”
An artists' representation of his or hers loved one is never honest, and by honest meaning true to reality even if his intentions and feelings may be. The result is a constructed object, conditioned by his or hers own subjectivity, skill, etc. We could extend this to everything an artist does. Therefore it is a polished honesty, conditioned and limited, that nevertheless can possess a deeper understanding of reality. The work of art, no matter how idealistic or unflattering it may be, it remains an enclosed reality that cannot substitute our own no matter how hard we try.
Polished Honesty reveals private moments from the personal life of the artists or their friends, documenting mundane, intimate, and even sexually explicit moments, everyday joys and hardships of a relationship. It may be a portrait of the couple, with the artists inviting viewers into their daily lives.
“We’re born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we’re not alone” -Orson Welles