In early December, the Pavel Șușară Modern and
Contemporary Art Museum in Bucharest (MAMCO) hosted the opening of an
exhibition bringing two generations into a dialogue. The exhibition, entitled Maxim
Dumitraș – Son and Father, is curated by Pavel Șușară and Dalina Bădescu, and
will be open until the beginning of February 2024. We asked one of its curators
about the significance of this exhibition in the contemporary art landscape and
about what makes it unique in Romania:
Pavel Șușară:
Indeed, it is a special-even more than special-event. It is unique in that
such an exhibition is impossible to organise again: even if in principle someone
could retrace the same scenario, the characters that made this exhibition
possible would be missing. It is an art exhibition, at a basic, superficial
level, and obviously we have all the art’s conventions present, we have
painting, graphic art, sculpture, all the classical genres, but what makes it
unique is its human content, its birth and its development, its substance. It
showcases the last period in the life of Max Dumitraș’s father, who, in order
to alleviate his loneliness and fears, was asked by Max to draw lines over a number of compositions by Max Dumitraș. What seemed to be a stereotypical
kind of work and a routine movement grew into a form of shelter from anxieties,
from loneliness, from the imminence of death which he obviously felt coming. It
became a sort of curtain, a sort of fence separating his world and the world
beyond, which was the world shaped and created by Max. But with these lines, Max’s
father created a protective screen, where he was safe from his own fears, and
with time, this fence became a sort of radiograph or a map of his physical and
psychological state. The lines become more and more faltering, less precise, more
and more fluid, until eventually it becomes completely random and unnatural. So
this makes the exhibition a meditation on life and death, a sort of redemption through
art, a kind of therapy for one’s dreads, a space where the certainty of
existing is still meaningful. It is yet another certainty.
We also asked Pavel Șușară what place does the
artist Maxim Dumitraș hold in Romanian contemporary art:
Pavel Șușară: He is an institution. Apart from having
created institutions, Maxim Dumitraș is an institution himself, in what he
achieved and in how he created events around him, organised symposiums,
arranged a natural space, some ravines which he turned into residences and work
areas for artists. And he did not embellish nature, he did not introduce
artificial elements in a natural setting, but integrated art in a natural
setting, thus proving that art in general, creation, is not separated from the
world for which we are not responsible, but rather a form of continuity and a
form of noticing its harmony.
Pavel Șușară also told us about the plans MAMCO has
for the year 2024:
Pavel Șușară: We have already scheduled exhibitions
for the entire year. We have a joint project with the Art Biennale in Plovdiv,
Bulgaria and we are partners in 2024. There will be 10 Romanian artists showing
their works there. Towards the end of the year we will have the miniature
salon, which we have turned into a biennale. All in all, we have some 6-7
exhibitions scheduled for next year.
In turn, the artist Maxim Dumitraș also gave us details
about the process behind this project completed together with his father in the
latter’s last years of life:
Maxim Dumitraș: I started it 8 years ago, I worked
with my father. He worked on the composition’s vertical axis, I worked on the
colour. We intervened and we worked together on these items, which are in fact
some canes which turned into something else over time, just like the father
line. They turned into objects that must be touched, we called them objects of
better. I worked on some 150 drawings with my father, we made some books
called Bags of dreams, in which he also made the lines and I did the colour. Between
the ages of 71 and 92, he was my apprentice in the atelier every day. When he
was younger, I used to be his apprentice, then we switched roles and he became
the creator-apprentice. He was a sort of philosopher, a person of exceptional
fairness and elegance.
At the end of the interview, Maxim Dumitraș told us
about his accomplishments in 2023:
Maxim Dumitraș: I always try to simplify things, but
every year they get more and more complicated. I made a monumental sculpture,
some 15 tonnes in weight. I had an exhibition in Bistrița and several other
projects in Sângeorz-Băi. It was a very prolific year, so to say. (AMP)