Sorin Neamtu - Satisfying Conditions

Satisfying conditions, R U kidding me?
it is what I text back when I've been asked to write a foreword for this book. All of a sudden I felt
unsecured. What qualifies me for doing that? My interest in art field is not a daily routine and even
tough I'm trying to do it more professional, I'm collecting art still as a hobby. We, together, are
running an art gallery, true, but that's merely for the tenacious and long-lasting friendship that links
me to Sorin Neamţu, the core and the ferment of our enterprise. Here I had a guess, that must be it!:
Sorin is Enkidu, my closest friend. This means faithful company, intimacy to thoughts and fears and
projects, to family and kids, to success and dissatisfaction and discontent. Therefore the one who
might have a better guess about the unexpressed, about unutterably subtle context of your deed,
should be he, who hunted (with me) in the wilderness, (my) brother,
[...] the axe at my side,
My hand's strength,
the sword in my belt,
The shield before me.

That must be it, I said to myself, friendship, a satisfying condition! [...]

Edited by AMT

english | 2016

23x16,5cm | 136 pages

16.00 €

ISBN: 978-80-89894-02-4

About author:

Sorin Neamţu has always been lured toward the object. Existing objects that had to be painted in order to be understood, not in their geometry, but in their sensual quality. Objects that contain the painter inside, landscape-objects. After that, constructed, invented objects, less interesting after they are finished than during their careful crafting. An almost impossible stake, and Sorin Neamţu, almost denying those objects any - in a classical sense - sculptural value, subjects them to a series of troublesome tests in order to bring the objects back to the metamorphic state previous to their execution. A state of an indecisive relation between the object and the environment or between the object and the public/author/user. These objects are called almost things because their design was conceived in order to produce discomfort and to lead almost to the impossibility of being used.
This uncertainty in relating with his own objects lead Neamţu on the path of painting the wrong paintings. Paintings that rise the question: What is the subject? What is to be painted? The objects are there, created by the artist himself, but are they to be painted? Should the objects be transported into a landscape and painted there?

It didn’t work. I was aware all the time that I was inside an error and I wanted to get out, the same way you find yourself in a room and the air becomes more and more rarefied and there’s no way out. But I knew that I had to get out. And it was very good thing to know at least that. Based on these facts, I started a few series of abstract paintings. But the abstraction hasn’t appeared as a result of non- subject, but rather appeared amid the unsuitability of subject with the image. The paintings had to speak themselves, the subject was obscured. So I did a series of paintings Blinded and Curtains. (Sorin Neamţu)

Sorin Neamţu is a Romanian artist born in 1977.