George M. Vasilescu

Vasilescus artistic work is the realisation of an unrealised dream: that of his mother to become an artist. To achieve this, Vasilescu has travelled long distances and endured considerable difficulties. Today, he signs many of his works with his mother’s name, Canuta (Romanes for ‘little cup’). Soon after his first own exhibition in the theatre of his home town of Ploiesti in Romania, he set out in 2008 in search of the roots of his people, while he himself had grown up largely separated from his family with his aunt. In faraway Bangladesh, where his next exhibition was to take place in the rooms of the Asiatic Society of Bangladesh, he saw much that was familiar in the way people interact with each other, as well as in the local culture. Vasilescu thus found his home in art, as well as in the supposedly foreign land that was the origin of his people many hundreds of years ago. His admiration for the Dutch-Catalan painter Lita Cabellut, whom he also portrayed, led him from Bucharest to the Kai Dikhas Gallery.

The artist explores interpersonal relationships in his works. The works are a call for affection as well as security, while mostly depicting the opposite. Symbolically, a sometimes enigmatic and dense parallel world emerges, inhabited by birds with top hats and caged people. Both symbols evoke associations with circus magic or mythological intermediary beings, but Vasilescu does not make such references, instead working with his own fantastic realism to represent coldness and loneliness. These themes are treated less enigmatically in his paintings of desolate, deserted socialist prefabricated buildings. Full of compassion and with confident, rough brushwork, however, he knows how to portray role models as well as friends. In his paintings, Vasilescu uses glued-on fabrics alongside the colours, and sometimes the canvases are slashed with knives. With a strong need for expression and a creative will, Vasilescu complements his art world with scenographic concepts. Here, too, we find bird masks and top hats as props. He creates a dark, claustrophobic stage space in which love is unleashed and desperately shakes our rules.

The idea for the exhibition THE GOLDEN CAGE OF THOUGHTS (17 August to 4 October 2013) came to Vasilescu in the summer of 2011, when he was helping to repair an old lighthouse on an island in the north of Norway. He also made his first sketches at that time. The image of the lighthouse has undoubtedly flowed into the sculptures; it seems as if his figures are lonely, monadic lighthouse creatures. In the winter of 2012, he then realised his ideas within two months and ‘materialised the incubated’ (Vasilescu). The sculptures are wire and plaster models painted in all shades of acrylic colour. Sometimes the underlying wire becomes visible like a nerve tract, reminding us how fragile the objects are, how easily destroyed. One can trace an aesthetic formal development in the figures. It seems as if Vasilescu is capturing an involuntary metamorphosis in which the head first grows higher and higher, taking on the form of a golden, filigree cage that sometimes seems to emit a kind of scream, until finally the whole body grows into a large anthropomorphic, organic cage.

The figures are Vasilescu’s own fantastic realism to depict coldness and loneliness. The Golden Cages of Thoughts are not a rigid symbol, rather they symbolise a process of liberation of the self and one’s own thinking through art. In this way, the cage sculptures allow us to trace an aesthetic-formal development. The artist captures an (un)voluntary metamorphosis of a human-like being, in which the head initially grows higher and higher and takes on the form of a golden, filigree cage until the whole body has finally grown into a large anthropomorphic cage. But the transformation continues; eventually the metal struts are more reminiscent of floral forms, climbing plants or flowers and less and less of cold metal: finally the bars are spread apart and slackened like an overripe flower and the bound being has left its cage – which was perhaps only a perverted cocoon – and is free. Vasilescu’s Golden Cages of Thoughts are not a rigid symbol; rather, his works are themselves a formal exploration of structures that, with their constant growth and creative artistic inventiveness, are inspiring documents of a process of liberation through art.