Mud and Gold
My art project Mud and Gold is primarily about peasant life in the Gyimes Valley. Still, secondarily it is about the difficulties and challenges of the rural lifestyle on a pan-European, even global scale. The rural way of life as a social structure is disappearing. Perhaps the best example is the story of the one-euro-priced houses in Italy.
The current capitalist economic system prioritizes the metropolitan way of life, to the extent that the thousands-of-years way of rural life is becoming impossible and hopeless. In my works of art, I show the everyday struggles of village people. The struggles they are forced to fight every day for their existence and identity. My works of art attempt to portray a collective perspective, as each painting is based on photos shared by people from Gyimes or shared about them on social media. This kind of collectivity thus presents a theme or a problem in such a way that several perspectives come together in a given representation, thus becoming a communal search for truth.
In my paintings, space and time are malleable, and discontinual. And its colors are almost monochrome, greenish. The use of the color green is a hommage to my master Imre Antal, who had a green period. On the other hand, it reflects an urban legend that says that during the communist era, Romanian painters, in the lack of materials and money, often made sketches with shoe polish, which in time turned greenish on paper. The use of pastel is also a strong reflection on the present and the past of Romanian art, since pastel, which is one of the cheapest materials, so it became a very popular technique in the country. I thought that the subject required a certain modesty and simplicity. The size of the artworks is also small because the life of the people from Gyimes and from other villages is closed and not revealing, to show the everyday life of a village on a huge canvas would be a controversial, disturbing, and provocative attempt.
Peasant romanticism is still alive in the media today, creating a misconception of rural life. I am trying to counter this by showing a problem that is not sufficiently addressed. I think after we notice the problem we can start to discuss it, and to generate solutions, or at least partial solutions, in the future. Ultimately, the project is the beginning of an attempt to conserve or even save the rural life and culture.
