In the heart of Romania

Night – a bright spot, a mannequin in a wedding dress. Twilight – a dark truck on a country road. Going where? A bolted door. A broken window. A wall, with “real” written across it. The artist, Mircea Stanescu, in front of a container with the word “Romania”.

Have we arrived? Where are we?

Stanescu’s snapshots illuminate a country we’re used to calling “Romania”. But do we really know it? The camera penetrates the surface and comes up against something that resists understanding. Once touched, it becomes a screen. What do the images shield? What do they conceal? Do they conceal at all, or is everything already there, in the images themselves?

Here, everything pushes to the surface – old and new, nature and product. On aged walls are symbols, signs, stickers. An outsized United Colors of Benetton poster on the colourless walls of houses. The map-like, peeling remains of paint. Frescoes that have outstayed time, peering from behind whitewashed undercoats. Colourful sauce sachets: Let’s dip Dracula. The fading leftovers of civilization on oil-dirtied water. Even death is two-dimensional: old grave stones, coated with a patina of light dust, sink back into the plane. On a wall – how many have there been now? – a picture of a sheep with death’s head, and a black bird, wings spread as if in flight, fallen to earth. The preordained lot of those that want to fly away from here?

The symbols, all these symbols – what are they saying? They point in no direction, in their counter-signature they give away only themselves, signifying ad absurdum. The arrow with the word “Buffet” points to a sign reading “urology clinic”. The “Canary Islands” bath towel – where are these Islands? Whose towels are they? And that’s definitely not a “meteor”, floating in the dirty water. “You swine! What have you done to Romania?”

A country in upheaval. Romanian saints, relics of an estranged past, stare impassively from above the door lintels. Though ironic, the picture is shot through with pain. Broken down and bolted doors, broken, shattered glass, and, again and again, Him, crucified, beaten, and nailed. Christ, realistically drawn, the scars on his feet. A poster of the crown of thorns, and directly beside it, one of Himself. The crucified Christ on offer in a shop window, and as a flat, lead Jesus at the side of the path, a fetching skirt to keep out the cold. Which cold?

New meets old. There’s no marriage between the two. Everything is present and irreconcilable. The gaze takes in both, and the pain becomes a laugh. The stone mermaid reclines in the sunshine while the dwarves keep watch, put to one side, like the inhabitants of this country. They’re waiting – for what? For someone to come along and buy them?

Total capitalism as European backyard policy: seen through a pane of glass, a window display. There’s an “I like Dracula” logo, as if an inscription for the whole, the “like” a glowing red heart, the heart of Romania in the cliché of its gimmicks. The big sellout in miniature: Dracula, domesticated in a hundred and one ways, alongside folklore dolls, mugs, plates, and, as an admission of wisdom, full-sized owls. All to be had at once – here, at least, equality is realized. The future is not yet there, while the past takes its leave and the present cancels itself out. Not all of this shameless exhibitionism is real, real is just the word written as if in blood. But that too isn’t genuine.

This real-existing irrationality, in all its unintelligibility, its nebulosity, is what fills Mircea Stanescu’s personal “air bag”. In the misalignment of two-dimensional facade-worlds, he banishes the uncertainty of the present day, of this place in which old and new, past and future, congeal into a permanently oscillating material. The bizarre, which reflects the image of these crazy times like a shattered mirror, contains in its shards, in its bolted doors, not only the salvation, which lies beyond all this. It also accepts the artist in the here-and-now. Mircea Stanescu comes from behind the viewfinder and climbs an old plinth, where he strikes the pose of a long-deposed dictator. And he leans on letters forming the word Romania, though he’s already sitting on his bicycle. Anyone travelling irony’s winding track can escape the irreal, as long as they take an airbag for protection.