11 november 2012 to 20 january 2013

opening reception : 10 november 6:30 pm

 

Here at the CCC, Dan Perjovschi is presenting his first large-scale solo exhibition in a French art center. It is the occasion for him to take a retrospective look at his work for the first time. Doing this poses particular issues for this artist specialised in drawing, whose work, being for the most part ephemeral and inspired by the ‘ripples’ of current affairs, is firmly anchored in the present.

 

At the CCC he is presenting a ‘Transparent Retrospective’, recreating the best of his work by drawing them on glass panels throughout the exhibition space. Drawing on his extensive collection of drawings made since 1990, he will be successively revisiting 23 years of artistic creation overlaid onto 23 years of recent history.

 

Dan Perjovschi is one of the major artists of the Romanian art world. The artist, with his long experience gained in the early 1990s in post-Ceausescu Romania as a press artist, brings to this graphic genre a rapid and incisive hand coupled with a dark humour. For the last 10 years or so, he has ceased to work only on paper, freeing himself to use chalk and marker pen on actual buildings of exhibition spaces, drawing with great freedom, even on floors, walls or windows.

 

Perjovschi is frequently invited to take part in the major biennales and exhibitions in worldwide galleries and museums, travelling around the world armed with his sketchbooks. Closely monitoring history in the making, he creates new drawings every day, combining his observations on the place where he is with the international current events taking place. Amongst his favourite targets are financial globalisation, global warming, and religious and political extremism.

 

His drawings are covered-over or erased at the end of exhibitions, but continue to circulate and are constantly renewed, mirroring the daily flow of information from which they originate. Perjovschi chooses to play with this process of erasure and recreation, of appearance and disappearance, sometimes involving the gallery visitors, who unbeknownst to them walk across artworks, or knowingly draw themselves, even drawing over the artist’s own drawings. This is what will be happening at the CCC: In parallel with his ambitious retrospective, Perjovschi will invite visitors to cover the walls with their own drawings, despite the fact that he has begun to work on them himself.