Headnotes- Sorin Neamțu

The recent works of Sorin Neamțu, created over the past three years, have emerged from a working process shaped by rules the artist has set for himself. For what would later appear on paper, on a primed wooden surface, on canvas or another material–sometimes painted over an earlier, older work –he chose the line as his point of departure. To this, he added another constraint: once a line had been drawn across the width or length of the surface, –the first one as straight as possible –the next line was to be placed as close as possible to the first, and the next again close to the second, and so on.

This procedure prevents, for Sorin Neamțu, the act of painting from illustrating an idea or concept, or from generating a representation, or an image of a narratively picturesque world. Such outcomes would not align with his understanding of painting. The artist places value on the process itself –the laying down of colour with brush, with quite thin oil sticks, or with the finest of drawing tools, for which he dons a magnifying lens to discern even the smallest distance between lines. For some works, he instead scratches such lines into and out of the colour mass.

To follow the artist’s activity in the studio is one layer through which we may perceive and situate his works within our own world. The result, the finished painting, forms a second layer. Though the painting reveals its individual lines, these converge into a structured surface in which the tremors and minor inaccuracies of each drawn gesture merge into an overall image –a kind of recording of seismic vibrations. Or are they recordings of thought, emotion, of the artist’s psychic state while at work? Are these the Headnotes?

The paintings on display are liberated from preconceived notions, from inner and outer realities that might be depicted, repeated, or rendered in unexpected, surprising, or critical ways. They are open to the associations of the viewer; they are images of a reality of their own. In seeking to sense this reality, the eye looks for what is familiar. Painterly echoes of Claude Monet’s Cathedral of Rouen series (1892–1894) come to mind, with its flickering fields of colour. So too the layered contours of traditional Chinese landscape painting (‘Shan Shui’–‘mountain and water’). The water surfaces of Vija Celmins, or the seascapes of Gerhard Richter, do not seem far away. Even the paintings of the Aboriginal peoples, mapping specific lands, ritual narratives, and mythologies, may serve as reference points.

All these works are the result of a craft-based process and an intellectual negotiation concerning what contemporary art –and painting in particular –can and should be. They are also reflections on what painting may mean to the artist himself, and what significance it might hold for society. This is a mental experiment, a challenge. Sorin Neamțu has returned to repeatedly since his work Action with Almost Chair(2012)–a performative act of withdrawal from painting.

The attempt to answer these questions again through painting –these are the Headnotes that hover above the works in this exhibition.

Rainald Schumacher