Primary Nation

2013, drawings, installation, neon light, plastic tube, flag frame



Following a discussion about colors (yes, it does happen sometimes) i figured out that the state of the nation in which i find myself (for some odd random reason), makes me stupidly discriminate the red, yellow and blue color combination. I found it funny and a bit embarrassing that three colors could cause so many conceptual problems.

That being the case, i decided to put them to the test, to limit my options and work with just the three, to isolate them like you would a virus. A B-movie version of Beuys’s episode with the wolf. The plan was to get rid of any inhibitions, to understand and accept these colors, and maybe while dealing with them learning to deal with... the rest.
Then as the drawings started appear and things took shape an empty/blank flag came to mind. It had to be white (an attempt for peace) and it had to contain a 0 as a replacement for the hole in the middle that still stands as the Romanian Revolution symbol. (Neutrality or a sort of a reset).

If it starts here, than maybe it ends here.

Colors have always been instinctive for me; it’s a huge and unfiltered pleasure to go with whatever you feel and any theory regarding chromatic, at the end and with all due respect, seems like a waste of time to me. So I had to solve this dilemma, perhaps to get one more confirmation that the direction i was heading in was the right one.

I said to myself that if Romania has taught me anything then it is that (and the choir sings:) limitations are great for art! A lesson that always kicks you in the ass and keeps reaffirming itself, a perpetual torsion that you cannot escape unless you go through it till the end.

Boy, is it good to have enemies! It keeps you from wasting precious time with silly useless things such as love, life, and abstract thought! Even if your enemies are just some colors that have no fault of their own...

This particular combination (red yellow and blue) has something impossible to me, something very hard to take on.

As a good friend and fellow artist, Adrian Preda once said that „on a parrot they look fine”. That’s maybe because the parrot is in itself something beautiful and free and in a completely different league. With people it’s complicated, because these three colors are not visible on them but they surely can be sensed.

The tired-depressed-poetic-yet-hopeful tricolorians are the direct product of a huge block party that never ends because the parents never come home, only the neighborhood continuously changes.