Marcel Rusu: Unpredictable Horizon

I am delighted to introduce the latest VSPACE exhibition focusing on a singular exceptional painting by the emerging Romanian Cluj-Napoca based visual artist Marcel Rusu (b.1989).

Unpredictable Horizon is a hybrid image, the use of visual metaphors and varying process ranging from airbrush, acrylic or traditional oil aims to create a fictitious and bizarre world, inspired by everyday reality, reflecting a dark optimism which describes the current geopolitical situation in an Eastern European country such as Romania.

Through his paintings the artist develops a utopian reality or a fake image, by juxtaposing fragments from different environments or from different moments: night-day for example. The work demonstrates a certain type of eclairage, a studio-like feel, an electric floodlit natural environment. The digital age, specifically the role of social media also plays a central part within this interior-exterior world. The use of artificial light, the conscious continual use of editing to alter light or composition to ultimately portray a certain illusion of perceived reality can be seen everyday in the partial artificiality of the images assumed by the enormous flow of information to which we are subjected daily. The artist wants to highlight how these kind of images changes the perception of our own reality.

Rusu employs several motifs, some of which serve as a connection to architectural modernism found in the former communist countries, such as the tetrapods, many of which are a recognizable architectural element of the Black Sea shore. This landscape strikes a chord with the artist, the memories of holidays flood the senses, the many instagrammable varying poses as with the central female figure within the painting. This everyday figurative pose strongly contrasts with the apocalyptic landscape in the background, the dark ominous clouds with the electrical storm discharging streaks of fork lightning, this is seen as a metaphor of the geopolitical context of Ukraine, which borders Romania both by land and by the Black Sea. The unpredictable context in which Romania finds itself as a former communist country, but at the same time a current member of the European Union and the transatlantic NATO alliance, reflects in the work a space which originates from the border between the two great cultures that divide the Eastern European space. (East and West).

As the title suggests, we live in an unpredictable world, constantly evolving, we also are part of a new online social media ecosystem, Marcel Rusu's working practice reflects the 21st century within its rhetoric of representational painting.