In every artist’s studio there are projects that linger in stillness, have been postponed, deprioritized or simply unripe. Everything repeats itself, everything has been done before, everything is déjà-vu when you work with images and when you exhibit them. There are, however, certain kinds of images that can bear repetition without losing their relevance, just as there are, at the same time, techniques of reproduction that condition visual representation, pushing it towards simplification and synthesis. For Dumitru Gorzo such a project materializes in Iași, in an exhibition of stencils.

Here is a conceptual Godzilla, wrapped in the armor of a tamed barbarian on the verge of extinction, who gets into physical fight with the media and techniques of art. He takes on reinventing mechanical reproducibility against our times. Manually. One sheet of paper after the other. Between the spontaneous and violent brushstrokes (the gestures of American expressionists throwing black paint on canvas) and the meticulousness of the sharp but fine cuts (as in Lucio Fontana’s canvases – a kind of minimalist stencil), Dumitru Gorzo focuses his energy on the peaceful searching of forms for a cubist visual vocabulary, to then transpose them ingeniously into a Kandinskian grammar and precision.

No. These are not drawings. This is Gorzo’s land: a zoo- and anthropo-logical garden, a custom-made cabinet of curiosities, where families of anthropomorphic figures gather together in a collection of gorzolănii – the paper edition. An inventory of beasts, an accumulation of stencils, hints and question marks about what a repertoire of images can still mean in an age of surplus.
Taking the form of a wall installation, the exhibition fills the gallery’s white space with an antonymic experience: immersive and distancing, overwhelming and breathable, amalgamated and minimalist. The materialities and the unfolding in different directions and intensities of the several hundred sheets of printed paper transpose you as well between the pages of an almanac as to the edge of the thorn forest where every tangle can hide the dragon.

Gorzo’s project at Borderline Art Space is not Banksy and not Perjovschi, not street-art or guerrilla art or documentary archive, not laboratory work or rebellious gestualism from the art history textbook. The stencil sheets that are sprayed and (re)sprayed in a variety of textures on a variety of paper surfaces are something else, but, above all, they are not drawings. They are extensions, reiterations, and reconsiderations of drawing, transforming the stencil from a replication technique into one of knowledge and exploration, through which working with paper can still generate surprises, adding to the artist’s inventory of beasts and anthropomorphic references.