Ioana Aron

Having Lunch with Daniel Spoerri represents an ”imaginary dialogue” between my artwork and the Eat Art movement, of which father is Daniel Spoerri. The idea of creating this artwork came to me spontaneously, when I was with my two month old baby, eating something in a hurry. I took a picture of that moment, of the composition that we, by being there, just created. Domestic activities and daily routine are elements that connect my entire artistic process. The structure on which all the artworks I make are based is the essence of my life, the way I live it and I document it. Having Lunch with Daniel Spoerri is an example of considering life a crucial element for art nowadays.

Spoerri’s imaginary dialogue takes place during lunch – a three course meal that leaves room for debate and conversation. The moment in my life that I extracted (a rushed lunch that turned into a photo session with Filip) is rendered in the form of dessert, a wooden object and ceramics that also combine the technique of collage. The glass window in the context of this composition symbolizes the “baggage” that I bring in conversation with Daniel Spoerri, the shop window being a motif found in many of my projects, as well as the shapes that have as a point of departure elements of vegetation. Through this artwork I argue that dialogue can be carried out between artists of all times, because works of art become fundamental landmarks of orientation and thus, timeless. Just like that, one day, at lunch, because I placed Filip on the table, I ended up having this “dialogue” with Daniel Spoerri, which I started by confessing him that for me “art is life itself ”.

The artwork is the outcome of a collaboration between an artist and a philosopher (Gabriel Vacariu). It consists of an installation with three portrait type photographs, a mirror and a pair of headphones next to each photo. It is a process that occurs in different moments, in the end the installation leading to the idea that the “mind has no sex”.

Each of the pictures is a different version of myself. The first embodiment is the unknowing character that does not distinguish between body and mind.

The second immortalizes the moment when the crucial questioning comes, followed by the understanding of the fact that the “self” (different than the “body”) is the loneliness.

The last character represents the immaterial” self” separated from the material “body” (the “nature” itself).

Each image is accompanied by the voice of Gabriel Vacariu, explaining the fact that this transformation process is universal, having no restrictions of gender. Both the photographs and the mirror will be framed in boxes with mirror on the interior walls, creating an intimate atmosphere for each object (involving Dostoevsky’s double and Kafka’s Metamorphosis). Visitors will become protagonists of the story, facing a framed mirror like the other three objects.

Institutions and museums around the world mark this year 350 years since the death of Rembrandt van Rijn, organizing various events in memory of the master.

The world we see when we look at a Rembrandt painting has not been portrayed by anyone else. We do not want to recreate this world. How can we do it in a digitized world, a world of neon lights, light boxes, white nights, and explosive colors? We intent to highlight different manners in which light enriches our life today through our “senses and feelings” (R. Arnheim).

Over the years, the human eye has changed, getting to see more and more colors and lights. If in Holland of 1600-1700 the way to illuminate a room was with a candle that offered the indispensable warmth present in Rembrandt’s paintings, today we can enumerate many more ways. To highlight this diversity of contemporaneity, in the Remembering Rembrandt exhibition there are presented four different interpretations of the light.

For artist Simona Vilău it is about the light-color. Her painting reminds of the strength of the color that the Fauvists speculated in the early 1900s. The easiness and courage with which she uses color in contrast to subjects based on sensitivity, emotion and self-knowledge led her to paint the two self-portraits, Lady Rain and Self-Portrait with cut trees, "exercises of acceptance and love for own body as for the others" as the artist declares. The artist-model relationship built between Rembrandt van Rijn and his wife, Saskia, based on a noble love that remains immortalized in portraits and nudes, is reinterpreted by Simona Vilău, which invites us to reflect on the human-nature relationship of our time.

The work “Dialogue with the Self” that I’ve painted at the beginning of this year reminds of the philosophical “mind-body problem”, as a replica to the “Aristotle with a Bust of Homer” painting. In the post-modernity era, the human being considers abandoning the body for something better, for breaking the limits for transcendence. Together with this comes the idea of metamorphosis which I speculate in my art. Everybody can leave the mediocrity to become extraordinary. To make a visual representation to this Nietzschean belief, “I have separated my mind from the body” and I have created so two distinct entities.

But I think Rembrandt’s work is much more about two other entities: light and darkness. Some of my most pleasant memories as a student are the visits to the studio of Professor Aurel Vlad, located just behind the University of Fine Arts in Bucharest. I used to go there from time to time to enjoy an amazing show of warm and cold lights, different according to the moment of the day. For an exhibition dedicated to the light, I really wanted to bring a corner out of his studio and settle it exactly like a play, like the story his characters tell when they are placed next to each other (wooden objects over metal objects), as they can be seen in the studio of the sculptor Aurel Vlad. The main element of the scene created for Remembering Rembrandt is the work called Accident (The Anatomy Lesson). Nine years ago Mr. Aurel Vlad saw an accident that made him think of the Dutch master’s famous painting The Anatomy Lesson. Taking it in a humorously way, the Romanian sculptor immortalized the moment.

Mihai Teodorescu, a sculptor of the young generation, chose to build especially for this project a sort of a street lamp with led, which symbolizes the becoming from the light of Rembrandt’s fire and the cold one, the one of today, encountered at commercials or street lights, "which transform the street contrasts from a dramatic movie into a thriller" as the artist mentions.