untitled, glass, johnny walker, rubber, 2009

untitled, thumbtack print 20/30cm, 2009

arrivals - departure, color photograph, 2009

“Dealul era un munte” (“The Hill Was a Mountain”)

It is not only about the images in Razvan Botis’s work but also about the need – created by history – to call an object “art”. They are observations of the simple, common, situations, sometimes still or immediate, with no arrogance or premeditations. Botis intelligently reports the reality stricto senso, right after the zero moment.


“Camouflage (Hidden Knife), it is still not about hiding
something but to give the knife its righteous position in
this world. The knife doesn’t have any other use than to
stay nice and easy in a pot, next to its sisters, to sharp
and long leaves. This is the definition of the knife.

The text (Some day I will get out and I will let this marker
dry”) - differently from the marker – needs air to survive.
The marker is not claustrophobic. You always have to choose
the piece of art out of three – four objects. I chose the
middle one. We find the same questioning on the utility of
the esthetics in the photograph “Provvisorio”. The provisory
state doesn’t need any esthetics, in other words: in order
to avoid any confusion we have to label the unaesthetic
right away”.
Ciprian Muresan

www.andreianamihail.com

the wonderful lamp,(aladdin), h121cm, 2009

provvisorio, color photograph, 2009

probe, color photograph, 2009

wool, gold, 2009

hidden knife, c-print 130/100cm, 2009

that feeling of triumph, c-print 100/70cm, 2009

"someday I will get out and I will let this marker dry!", window, marker inside the window, disappeared text , 2009

15 CONTEMPORARY ARTISTS FROM ROMANIA.




How does a citizen suddenly become a physical non-entity? Invisible Bodies: Conspicuous Mind is an exhibit of contemporary Romanian art that visually confronts the issues of personal identity in everyday life. The exhibit is not only a window into a unique post-communist bloc country but inadvertently produces a subtle, potent dialogue about life today in the United States.

This exhibition is guest-curated by Lara Taubman.

Participating artists: Ciprian Muresan, Adrian Ghenie, Serban Savu, Marius Bercea, Dan Perjovschi, Alexandra Croitoru, Mihai Iepure-Górski, Cristi Pogacean, Gabriela Vanga, Miklos Onucsan, Mona Vatamanu and Florin Tudor, Ion Grigorescu, Razvan Botis, Lia Perjovschi.


OPENING RECEPTION.

Saturday, September 19, 2009 | 6 PM | Luckman Gallery

Small gestures



On Thursday, July 16, 2009, at 16.00, the second exhibition from the Young Romanian Art series will be opened in the New Gallery of the Romanian Cultural Institute in Venice, Italy. The exhibition is entitled 'small gestures', and it brings together works by Razvan Botis, Cezar Lazarescu, Daniel Knorr, Mihai Iepure-Gorski.


At the edge of day-to-day life the realm of the insignificant begins. That is precisely where minor gestures and objects can be found. However, they can always be manipulated in order to become surprising. This might happen because of a poetic impulse, which turns things into powerful images. Sometimes it might all come down to the release of existential tension.

It is also possible to make discoveries of a cognitive level within this area, as between perception and meaning a screen can always be interposed. This can lead one to the realization of the fact that we often take the world around us into our heads through a series of automatic mental moves.

The sincere beauty of raw materials meets a series of conceptual attitudes, creating discrete objects and gestures, whose simplicity is only apparent.


Young Romanian Art is Mircea Nicolae's residency project at the Romanian Cultural Institute in Venice, during which the artist functions as an organizer and a curator. This series of one-week exhibitions aims at promoting young Romanian art during the Venice Art Biennial 2009.

black hole, two mirrors face to face, 2008

resin, gold, wood, 2008

MISSING LINK




Dan D. Farcas, Razvan Botis & Lee Welch

Curated by Stefan Tiron

Opening 23 June 2009
23 June - 14 July 2009

Andreiana Mihail Gallery, Bucharest


This could easily become a welcome research for OOPARTS – short for Out-Of-Place artifacts or artifacts unavailable at any historical time.

It is a tradition already to feel bad about the imperfection and patchiness of the fossil record. However this has never managed to put a stop to the search for the missing link. Eerily, the need to complete and resolve that record triggers new discoveries seeking re-insertion and repeated inclusions into a larger tree of life. The buried grandeur of The Great Chain of Being still claims a need for docile transitions, nearly perfect and almost coherent conceptual bridges, and above all for a series of key artifacts that can artfully smooth down the creases and folds of an unruly historical tapestry. Even if the final and glorious proof is always missing in action, it acts in its own absence still, spewing portentous inferences and ominous deductions and providing us with some of the necessary tangible stepping stones. We look for the magnificent very early avant-garde culprits too good to be true or for the superior alien interlocutors as all too generous and hidden benefactors of the human civilization on planet Earth. We look for the magical spells and talismans able to offer us easy access into higher realms of plenty.

Long overdue, we are maybe now ready to acknowledge our need to keep filling up the curiosity cabinet. Two artists and one mathematician and ufologist are here to provide at least some of the missing parts.

Following the common rules of serendipity, the gathered artifacts may even become unintended pieces of alarmist propaganda, while still being just a series of small clues as to the doom of underlying order.

argo, silver, 2009

magic beans, 14 karat gold, live size, 2008

We all know the English fairytale Jack and the Beanstalk.
Razvan Botis is making the necessary connection between the
western fairytale and the foundations of the alimentary/financial
model of the modern fairytale. It is the presumption
of entering a different world with the help of magic beans;
and these beans that are in fact nothing else than perfectly
polished gold nuggets. The great economic crisis of 2008 is a
daily report on the credibility of the banking system, the due
investments and the heavy loans. The banking system was adept in
dealing with magical tricks and the abracadabra of stock exchange.
All the wonders of the economical profit is a wobbly business,
a way to jump off the highest graph peaks. The words that are
recurrent in newspaper articles and economical analyses are
“meltdown” and “bubble”. Both the global balloon and the global ice,
are nothing else than frail materials, ready to crack, ready to pop
and melt in front of you. The natural magic of the free market
doesn’t last. It lasts as much as the economic mirage based on trust
and risk does. We have once again forgotten that the beanstalk and
the economic magic are based on illusionist principles. Here it is!
Now it’s gone! They are mainly helped by the “invisible hand”
(sleight of hand?!) and partially by the carefully applied golden
varnish. The proverbial gold rush is the chase for the gold beans
that facilitate the access to the magic world of the rich and powerful,
where there is plenty of everything. It’s the world of capitalistic
abundance in which a few get visible rewards and others can only peek,
and help to rub off the polished surface.
The Jack and the Beanstalk fable contains several references to profit,
theft and prosperity. Who is the giant ogre who owns the golden
egg laying hen? Possibly the bankers who suffer a cruel faith,
collapsing from the sky with a great bang! along with each economic
crash. One must be really naive to believe that once buried,
the magic beans will grow over night. It’s all based on faith,
on a sort of false belief in the reproductive quality of the precious metals. Precious metals growing above-ground, are ready to be replanted
in order to grow as climbers on the social ladder. The beanstalk that
grows steadily makes you forget all caution.
This beanstalk is modeled, just like any other ladder, on the logic
of escalating towards unfamiliar heights.
Once on the top, one feels dizzy. As an anarchic gesture, to cut
down the beanstalk as Jack did, means to pull down the steps, a
collapsing gesture which may even lock down the possibility of
returning to the ground, downwards, towards safety and justice.

Stefan Tiron