The River + The Great Escape / NAG / Bucharest. 2020

If you would see the city from above, you would not notice the immovable buildings, you could see a map of the streets, access roads, sinuous traces of the rivers, the rational outline of the roads, the bridges connecting one road to another. And that’s because the individual is explained through communication. But as communication also involves silence, pauses, periods of absence, so maps have their invisible side, unblended, random paths that happen only once, in the absence of witnesses. Between visible and invisible, between what is fixed and what passes, between form and life is an inseparable relationship. In order to discover it, the form of “life” should always be different, like a flickering.

The current project involves a large canvas depicting a “possible” del Guercino Square in Ferrara, over which will be projected in real-time the same image of a surveillance camera. Choosing this place is not accidental. It resembles the atmosphere of Giorgio de Chirico’s works, his metaphysical paintings inspired by the plazas from Ferrara. The rectangular shape of this square, resembling a theatre scene, will show in real-time, the interventions and choices made by the passing people, the unseen traces of their intention, and the web of meaning they are knitting. The concept of the project also refers to a critique of painting as a medium. The two-dimensional plan of the representation is only its visible part. A work hides in itself the time in which it was created, which gives it depth.

Andrei Gamarț’s challenge is to give the painting a new dimension, that of the continuum, in order to motivate her, to get her out of time, to become a constantly changing work, to be produced live, announcing that this form is much closer to what we call “life.” The project also includes the painting and live video installation ‘The Great Escape’, presented for the first time at NAG 2016.