Claudia Radulescu Unlimited Edition
After many explorations on dialogue, the Orangerie continues the adventure through the 2020 season focusing on the themes of partnership and collaboration. The exhibition "Unlimited Edition" opens the ball with Claudia Radulescu, visual artist, performer but also musician, singer, and passionate about human relations. The edition of dog tags engraved with "I want to live with you" (Unlimited Edition, 2020) is offered simultaneously at the Bastogne War Museum and the Orangerie. Before that, the visitor or walker is greeted or accompanied by an Anthem for the Park, composed with Michel Hatzigeorgiou.
Together, Claudia Radulescu and Gauthier Pierson have collected a series of objects, preparatory drawings that have become works, videos, etc. These elements relating to a series of projects thus form a quasi-retrospective of the artist's work. These projects often start from an event or an element of the artist's life, apparently insignificant, from an encounter with a person, sometimes biographical elements. They flourish between plastic art and reality, as well as between performance and autobiography, even if it is not voluntary.
In the privacy of the office, it is sometimes hard to feel that the exhibition is already beginning, but the first contact with Claudia Radulescu's work is made there and is direct and immediate, with her photographY JTM. This is done in a certain aesthetic of advertising, appropriate, diverted and certainly less sterile. The artist is the model, poses reclining and holds a sign that reads "I love you. The work catches the viewer from the first meters and tries to create a direct and intimate link with him. The office also presents the Tamango video, which is part of a large project with the Museum of Contemporary Art of Bucharest (MNAC), two sculptors Bors - Ritiu and Marius Nedelcu. This collaboration aims to offer an effigy of the musician Gypsy Tamango, much appreciated in Romania, to his wife. Tamango is much more than a creation of a sculpture, it is a living activation of the effigy, with the complicity of his wife who drinks coffee and smokes his cigarette with him in the morning. The transport of this statue is recorded in a road trip style, contrasting with the museum atmosphere of white cube. The exhibition at the Orangerie is, like this road trip, a rock and casual experience of Claudia's various projects.
The viewer is then welcomed into the vast room with the sounds of Ghost Driver, a song produced in collaboration with Daan, which speaks of love and on which the figures of HYPERGARGALESTHESIA slowly dance. The viewer can attempt to explore anti-glamour, anti-sensual positions in ring of Hair's fire circles, and thus become a complete actor. He is also invited to draw with his cigarette on the artist's silhouette, drawn on an enamelled plate and pierced with holes. It is also in this room that the Unlimited Editions are exhibited, in a model couch in the shape of a vampire tooth. "I WANT TO LIVE WITH YOU" is inscribed on these dog tags (Unlimited Edition), which go from hand to hand. Simple words, simple gestures, human relationships.
The exhibition then switches to the rotunda filled with drawings, sheets of paper abused with paint, preparatory drawings-turned-works, videos and performance objects: a mask, a golden massage table, a vinyl-tree bag edition. The viewer finds himself in this pantheon, a veritable treasure room full of interpersonal relationships and collaborations that form a real starting point for almost any project for Claudia Radulescu. This insatiable need for social relations is a fertile artistic breeding ground. She still expresses herself outside the Orangerie with Incitement to Privacy, exposing in the form of neon the telephone number of the artist that allows to extend relations beyond the exhibition.
Hélène Jacques
