Gili Mocanu, born 1971, Constanta, Romania, lives and works in Bucharest, Romania and is considered one of the most acclaimed conceptual painters in Romania. Between abstractionism and conceptualism, his paintings transform the canvas surface into realms of unearthly desires.
Mocanu’s works construct non/spaces, at the confluence of non/meaning and non/matter. Their subtlety lies in how the finitude of the canvases encapsulate and enable infinity to unfold in mathematically in/finite lines. The indeterminate nature of Gili’s geometrical structures gives the paintings the possibility to multiply three-dimensionally in a myriad number of ways, in an absurd construction of space and time, a possible nonreality that floats outside the canvas. As forms grow out of each other, the paintings surface to an imminent performative level.
In Karen Barad’s words, “Nothingness is not absence, but the infinite plentitude of openness”. Gili’s compositions are at once a-subjective and a-objective, yet it is precisely this void that nurtures a spectrality to the paintings. Narratives of lines, volumes, the corners of unlived living rooms, speculative voids, like gigantic colourful pixels on a TV screen, transform the bi-dimensionality of canvas surfaces into cinematic flows. Escaping the representation of a real sense of placeness, the abyssal and ghostly feelings of the paintings choreograph the gaze. As such, the possibility of meaning and identity still weighs relationally between the materiality of the surfaces and the onlooker.
In repeated flashes of light and darkness, Gili’s works are hauntological cavities, plunging into a liminal terrain between presence and absence, being and non-being.
