On Monday, September 14, 2009, at 16.00, the eighth exhibition from the Young Romanian Art series will be opened in the New Gallery of the Romanian Cultural Institute in Venice, Italy. The exhibition is entitled 'superheroes', and it brings together works by Elena Ciobanu, Claudiu Cobilanschi and Oana Toderica.
People with super-powers seem to exist even in real life. It is enough to take a look at those who carry on repeating the same set of gestures, without allowing for too much change from one day to the next. Sometimes you refuse to hear what they are telling each other. You replace their conversations with the memories of a few lines from a comic strip. Then you forget they ever existed.
There are also the superheroes of a given line of work, the ones everyone is talking about. Before you know it, they can become the success brands of the moment. And it makes sense (even to the persons in question) that you vehiculate their names. You can even print t-shirts to make them more famous. This is how everybody will find out it that they are the powerful.
The strangest are superheroes with doubts. About themselves, about the other mortals around them. They are the ones who put the ethics of superpowers to the test. They are the ones who try to find a balance between the surplus of force that (they think) they possess, and a humbler definition of oneself and of the world.
Young Romanian Art is Mircea Nicolae's residency project at the Romanian Cultural Institute in Venice, during which the artist functions as an organizer and a curator. This series of one-week exhibitions aims at promoting young Romanian art during the Venice Art Biennial 2009.
