2011 - 2010 works by Dan Voinea

2011 - 2010

PLAYBOY AFTERNOON / D’ANCONA BUDIS GALLERY, Bucharest / 2011

PLAYBOY X-RAY

[by ALEXANDRU DONE]

Fan: Hugh Hefner, Buddha, and Gandhi. Cities: Monaco and Pyongyang. Brands: Rolex and McDonald's. His only posts are short comments on luxury articles. He has just a few friends. He's an exclusive kind of guy. He doesn't click "accept" without references. He wears Converse and Cesare Paciotti, and sometimes indulges in the nostalgia of magical realism. He's retro-cool. In the photo section, he still hasn't uploaded anything, even though he has an entire archive of conquests. He's not active on his wall either. The status section contains no information, and his avatar is just a shape. That's roughly what the Facebook profile of the atypical playboy imagined by Dan Voinea should look like - a complicated and interesting character. Playboy Afternoon represents an x-ray of suspended gestures in the aftermath of our daily tremor, lazily unfolding as a sequence of celluloid frames. The main characters skid surrealistically out of an ordinary emotional wireframe, fill the void in the imaginary and then transfer our reality into a Hollywood-type mind-set, with some tongue-in-cheek classical references. In Dan Voinea's vision, the kiss scene is recalibrated and the main characters are only capable of a self referential kind of love, caught in a hunt for alter egos. A psychological tragic comedy using surprising images that have the aftertaste of unfulfillment, of a goal which, in order to finally achieve, you may need a 'help' button.

FRESH ANGLE, 2011 / oil on canvas / 100 x 120 cm / (39,37 x 47,24 in)
PLAYBOY, 2011 / oil on canvas / 100 x 120 cm / (39,37 x 47,24 in)
STREETCAR SCENE, 2011 / oil on canvas / 100 x 120 cm / (39,37 x 47,24 in)
BLOOPER, 2011 / oil on canvas / 100 x 120 cm / (39,37 x 47,24 in)
THE EXTRAS, 2011 / oil on canvas / 100 x 120 cm / (39,37 x 47,24 in)
CHARADE, 2011 / oil on canvas / 120 x 100 cm / ( 47,24 x 39,37 in)

Construction by Deconstruction

[by Valentina Iancu / ARTA Magazine, September, 2011]

In big-size works displayed in monumental galleries by deliberate off-balance, the artist places his heroes in the damaged everyday space where non-finite pictorial is a mark for general disorder. Voinea's approach aims at a nightmarish world, with over-sized saviors, with a Baroque beauty of ugly and, sometimes, grotesque shapes. The surreal vision, expressed through powerful imagery, is even better articulated in his second exibition, opened in 2011 at D'Ancona Budis Gallery, Playboy Afternoon. Painted as convulsively, yet more freely, these works evoke a world that has been recomposed from decomposed fragments. Once again, his shapes are built by subordinating drawing to color, in a kind of skillful puzzle. A cinematic juxtaposition turns them into a Hollywood thriller revisited. A fantastic vision placed in a concrete urban space. The city, or rather its edge, is hooked by the spectacle of the world. Urban space seems inhabited by hybrid human beings who blur fantomatically. Voinea's world looks like an obsessive diving in the consciousness of contemporary man being scrutinised in a systematic filmic madness. The city responds to the irreprressible desire of fantasmagorically assembled people whose story, recognisable to a point, becomes the centre of interest of all his works.

BUILDING THE ARK, 2012 / oil on canvas / 30 x 50 cm (11,81 x 19,68 in)
ARK, 2012 / oil on canvas / 100 x 60 cm (39,37 x 23,62 in)
ROOKIE, 2012 / oil on canvas / 110 x 120 cm (43,30 x 47,24 in)
CROSSWORDS, 2011 / oil on linen / 120 x 110 cm (47,24 x 43,30 in)
BREAKPOINT, 2012 / oil on canvas / 120 X 110 cm (47,24 x 43,30 in)
CONTEST, 2012 / oil on linen / 150 X 135 cm (59,05 x 53,14 in)
WALKING BACKWORDS, 2012 / oil on linen / 120 x 110 cm (47,24 x 43,30 in)
GAMEOVER, 2011 / oil on canvas / 120 x 130 cm (47,24 x 51,18 in)
COOL EMBRACE II, 2010 / oil on canvas / 100 x 120 cm (39,37 x 47,24 in)
COOL EMBRACE I, 2010 / oil on canvas / 100 x 100 cm (39,37 x 39,37 in)