RADU RODIDEAL
DISCLOSURE OF ROMANCE
21st November - 18th December, 2019
Opening hours: Tues - Sa, 2 - 6 pm
Charlottenwalk: Friday, 22nd of November 2019 until 21:00
Romantics felt that feelings are a deeper layer of the soul than reason. German romantic composer Robert Schumann stated that "The mind is confused, the feelings never." If, in the writings of the French Romantic philosophers, the desire was the center around which the whole thesis was outlined; in German Romanticism, the central theme is the platonic and unshared love. The tragic, the suffering, the loneliness, the absence, the contemplation of a moment or of a human being, which cannot be touched, are the attributes of an absolute romanticism, which is today trapped in the darkness of time and the storm of events.
Radu Rodideal is concerned with the theme of romanticism in art and the way in which romanticism can be reproduced and reinterpreted today; in a society where the absence of feelings has become a norm. In romance, it was the feelings that triggered the drama, they were a product of rivalry and jealousy, of the idealization of the other. After the sexual revolution of the 1960s, romanticism becomes something "outdated", feelings fade in the face of sexual freedom, of the carnal desire.
In the series of paintings "Disclosure of Romance", Radu Rodideal describes the moment when you vibrate at the touch of a hand, at the sight of a foot in a mesh stocking, waiting for a phone. At Rodideal everything is vibration, sound, mystery, ineffable. His characters live in solitude wrapped in an aura of mystery. It is the representation of the desire, of the attraction often in the absence of the other. For the artist, the interior states of his characters are important, the moments that are over and the time that has passed. Tension is often suggested, disagreements occur in the absence of the partner, within a state of fact. The insistence on certain details of everyday life, banal, predominates the scene offering the sensation of an omniscient, neutral, lack of involvement. His characters exist in their own, in their individual inner turmoil, in solitude.
"Disclosure of Romance" proposes a careful look at contemporary relationships through the lens of the individual troubled by love, passion, desire, betrayal, deception, duplicity, secrecy, revenge and possessiveness. Rodideal paints the whole interior struggle, within a stylized figurative contoured by clear lines, as a contrast of shapes and colors.
Curator: Diana Dochia, PhD
Radu Rodideal was born in 1986 in Bucharest, Romania. He is one of the leading young artists from Romania with exhibitions in Austria, Germany, and Romania. He graduated in 2010 at the University of Arts in Bucharest, painting department and in 2014 the University of Music, piano department. In his paintings the artist discusses the allusive eroticism hidden in the most ordinary actions, places or objects, sometimes revealing the emotional burden they carry on their own. His artworks can be found in private collections from Germany, Romania, France, Italy, Belgium, USA. Disclosure of Romance is the first solo show of the artist in Berlin. He is represented by Anaid Art Gallery Berlin, since 2018.
