Zeno X Gallery proudly presents the first solo exhibition of the young Romanian artist Mircea Suciu (°1978). His paintings and drawings combine abstraction and figuration and often deal with socio-political themes. Suciu reflects on the implications of a life under a dominating political regime. Protests against war and occupation are inevitably accompanied by a questioning of cultural identity, national frustrations and social changes. Mircea Suciu translated these phenomena into images, paying particular attention to the psychological impact experienced by the population. The artist is particularly fascinated with the psychology of the individual in times of social and political crisis. The installation ‘Dust to Dust’, shown a few months ago at the Gwangju Biennale in South Korea, brings all these ideas together in an overwhelming manner. It contains fifty works on paper, which refer to key political events in modern world history. The diversity of techniques used by the artist results in an extraordinary mosaic of images, which testifies of Suciu’s interest in the exploration of the pictorial possibilities of representation. Mircea Suciu used to recuperate images mostly from magazines and newspapers. The works ‘1988’ and ‘1988 (2)’ are also based on photographs of Ceaușescu’s hands which Suciu found in an archive. Recently he started staging and making photographs himself. This allows him to create an individual visual language and further the metaphorical power of his work. While the subjects the artist chooses clearly hark back to the past, he never fails to focus on the present and the future. Suciu avoids dogmas, conventions and genres, while simultaneously exploring the limits and possibilities of this charged medium.

Suciu uses a technique in which oil is mixed with acrylic and then applied on a monoprint on paper or canvas. The photographic image of the monoprint allows him to organize the details and the composition while the paint adds colour and texture to the works. He simultaneously conceals and reveals. For Suciu, the process is as important as the final image. The work undergoes different stages of creation, destruction and restoration in order to create a damaged surface; layeredness in terms of both meaning and physical form is a crucial aspect for Suciu.

‘Root and Branch’, the title of the exhibition, on the one hand refers to the Root and Branch Petition of 1641, which led to a separation of church and state in the London Parliament. Mircea Suciu’s works also show a world in which belief in God and the church no longer exist. The figures in his paintings attempt to take control of their own destiny. ‘Root and Branch’, on the other hand, refers to something that has been thoroughly done. Suciu often works in series in order to exhaust certain motifs until he reaches the essence of an image. Finally, the ‘root’ can also be understood metaphorically as the foundation or the core of something. The communist past of Romania remains an important issue for the artist. The series entitled ‘Moving to the left / right’ and ‘Iron Curtain’ address the tensions in Eastern Europe between West-minded people and the supporters of the communist model. The camouflage works provide a broader critique on global politics and the way in which society manipulates and ‘camouflages’ events.

Suciu tries to create images which thematically and pictorially trigger the curiosity of the public. Loaded themes are powerfully translated into a formally harmonious visual language.

Work of Mircea Suciu was shown in the exhibition “Scènes Roumaines” at Espace Louis Vuitton, Paris (FR), “Defaced” at the Boulder Museum of Contempoary Art, Boulder (US),”Hybrid” at Fondation Francès, Senlis (FR), “Sex, Money and Power” at Maison Particulière, Brussels (BE), ‘Nightfall - New tendencies in Figurative Painting’ at the MODEM Centre for Modern and Contemporary Art, Debrecen (HU), “European Travelers’ at Mucsarnok Kunsthalle, Budapest (HU), the 4th Biennial Prague (CZ) and the 11th Istanbul Biennial (TR).

In 2015, Mircea Suciu will also have a solo exhibition at the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Bucharest (RO).