Dragos Burlacu - Cosmin Nasui

Ceausescu, the gadget-vintage-glamour, contemporary idol
Cosmin Nasui

The blood drained from the installation history is coloured into pink or other fluorescent colors, as appropriate. Just because history is “cool” and the myths are recyclable as vintage icons. And if Ceausescu was still in life, he would be on the cover of the glossy magazines free to impose this. As the dictator-idol had a life with rock star eccentricities, wich make from himself an easy sold product, especially to foreign tourists.

Ceausescu’s cult was created by controlling all the arts skillfully directed into a sole direction. This is why the power of Ceausescu’s image is a special attraction as a pop on synonym with the forcing the beginnings of the modern urban civilization, “at the block”. The paradox makes the representation, some other time rather mandatory, of Ceausescu in all arts, be now a deliberate choice of the contemporary creative persons which have transformed him in stencil and graffiti on the grey block of flats.

Dragos Burlacu represents Ceausescu both in the hypostasis of a Supreme Leader and as the man sometimes attracted by expensive pleasures. The frames of these past realities seem fantastic. His compositions where Ceausescu appears firing a bow or a gun, a chess hunting, or diving enthusiast in working visits, or in Court widely gesturing are inspired from “The Golden Age ”.
The Understanding History project started, as the artist says “from the need to recall the recent history and implicitly to achieve connections with the present to understand the future”. In a way or another by the manipulator interpretation or by the reproductions such of the images of Ceausescu’s family, the history is passed through an artistic filter. Cult-images loaded with ideologies function differently according to the context of the historic moment. Building a myth by the image cult was the debunked by the tourists’ flash. And if the socialism was a failure, the image cult of “The Beloved Leader” was consolidated into a capitalist product success with gadget-vintage-glamour specifications.

The interpretations of the reality with the truth and fiction in the art with historic or political subjects overcome the contextual boundaries employed of certain relative aesthetics, to fully serve the charm of historical mutations, becoming a mandatory passage of the contemporary creation.