Periphery
Romania Between Worlds (2013)
Working title: CHEZ GLOD
glod (n., Romanian)
- 1. mud; boggy place, muddy ground or road. Synonyms: muck, slime, sludge, mire.
A geographic and ideological crossroads.
Ghosts in the collective subconscious.
Between the plains village and the provincial market town.
The last profane glimmers of a sacred order — fading slowly, without witness.
The people in these images are no longer here.
Without Balkan kitsch packaged for external consumption.
Without irony.
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“Chez Glod” is a visual reclamation of a world often represented in caricature or with condescension. The real village of Glod, used in the film Borat (2006) as the grotesque décor of a supposed Kazakh province, becomes here a topographic pseudonym for a space of affective memory.
The series restores to this East-European typology of place its aesthetic dignity and a three-dimensional presence: visual, affective, and human.
Psychological realism.
Romanian light on the verge of disappearance.
Portraits, objects, forgotten rooms.
Documentary, without intervention.
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An affective tonality and ethos close to the album Fantome (Subcarpați, 2015):
layers of popular memory, slow decay, anonymous force, collective reverberations.
1. Chez musiu' Tureac
2. Spiritual Intermezzo
3. The Old Homestead
4. Exterior Study
5. Dl. Apopei, a colonel retired
6. Shade of Evening
7. A Profitable Counsel
8. Haunted Quarter
9. Reveica
10. Old Chamber in the Borough
11. Idle in the Pavilion
12. Veranda
13. Dusk of the Village
Stalemate:
Psychological
Noir
He does not play the pieces, but people.
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“The Strategist” (intimidation). A dominant gaze across the chessboard. Chess as metaphor for the transfer of power.
- “The Good Boy” (seduction). The “trustworthy” social persona (the conformist superego).
Light is the key in which the emotional registers are read; the alternation of seduction and control, and the fantasy of omnipotence, inscribed in the gaze.
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This series directly converses with Stalemate (novel, M.Rotundo): the same device of the protracted game — the stalemate between allurement and domination. The portraits stage the mechanism analyzed in the novel: the alternation of strategist and mask, and the triangulation that keeps conflict unresolved. The stake is not victory, but the maintenance of the game — that is, dependency.
Studies in Chiaroscuro
Philosophical Storyboard
The aesthetic of European cinema, in a Renaissance lineage.
A reclamation of classical form and cultural tradition.
In the opening scene, a woman contemplates a goldfish enclosed in a glass bowl. It is recognition: in the captive fish she sees her own destiny as a decorative being. An objet a in the Lacanian sense: not the object of desire, but the cause of desire — the screen upon which the other’s fantasies are projected.
This melancholic identification is not at all narcissistic. It is not admiration, but an intuition of function. Beauty becomes a form of captivity: the woman, like the goldfish, is incarcerated for an aesthetic purpose.
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This series illustrates the idea — today regarded as obsolete — of the unity between outward aesthetics and inner density.
It celebrates beauty without irony, in its older sense, before its dethronement in contemporary Anglo-American culture — and the draining of its intellectual content or moral aspiration.
Discreet motifs (a clock, a grille, a goldfish) point toward time, reflection, and play. The gaze does not covet, it contemplates. The emphasis falls on the human face as affirmation of psychic intensity. It is a return to the rigor of the classical portrait.
The entire set is a metaphorical cone of light, directed with surgical precision toward the face, staging the expressive language of its features — as poetic cinema once did, attentive to subtleties and to the vast register of human emotions.
In today’s visual culture, the image tends to flatten the face as an affective space, reducing drastically the range of recognizable emotions. Facial expressivity is often ignored, left undeciphered in cultural products that exploit the face superficially, but do not contemplate it as an external testimony of the soul.
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What the series rejects: vulgarity, and formal innovation without purpose. It does not seek shock, but classical measure; not nudity, but the unleashing of the gaze through light.
It rejects the schism between beauty and feeling; between seduction and elegance; between interior and exterior.
1. Mutual Recognition
2. Rembrandtian Study of Light
3. In Wait of the Harvest
4. Ludens
5. Chronos — Acceptance of Role
6. Melancholia Within the Aquarium