BIOGRAPHY
Mircea Cantor was born in Oradea, Romania, 1977. Lives on the Earth
2008 The need for uncertainty, Modern Art Oxford; Arnolfini, Bristol; and Camden Arts Centre, London
2007 Ciel Variable, Fonds Régional d´Art Contemporain Champagne Ardennes – FRAC, France;
Airs de Paris, Centre Pompidou, Paris
2006 The title is the last thing, Philadelphia Museum of Art, USA
2006 4. berlin biennale
Selected Bibliography GOPNIK, Blake, “The Idea: Predator, Prey, Provocative”,
Washington Post, 28. October 28, 2007; LEQUEUX, Emanuelle, “Un Autre Monde est Possible – Portrait”,
Beaux Arts Magazine, no. 275, May, 2007, pp.108; RABOTTINI, Alessando, “A future world”,
Flash Art, no 251, November-December, 2006.
INTERVIEW
Bartolomeo Gelpi: In the introduction text of your book it says you come “from the world of images, from photography, graphic design and video…”* From 2005 on you have been making works where the manipulation of matter evokes the presence of the individual. What sort of input did it bring to your work?
Mircea Cantor: My necessity is what the idea requests, not the material. It’s not accidental that I work with images and I decided to make a carpet. Everything is subordinated to the Idea. I don’t try to anatomize my work in this way.
Bartolomeo Gelpi: There’s a strong irony in making a flying Christian symbol and a flying modern machine become a motif for a flying carpet. However, when I consider this carpet is made by Romanian weavers, this irony is partially dissolved. I don’t know if that’s because it is confronted to a technical and objective way of dealing with those elements, or because the evocation of this particular group of ladies brings a warmer approach to the object…
Mircea Cantor: The story behind it is not so important. By heritage we know ladies weave carpets, but more important than this is what kind of tension you can reach. We all know about angels, even if we are not Christians, we have all heard about the Arabic stories and we don’t know why these three elements are in the same place and the same time. As we live in a simultaneous world where various items meet in the same place and time, there is a space of a beautiful tension that can lead toward a new vision. It’s a polarized work, about the visible and the invisible. And you may not know how to choose the good one.
Bartolomeo Gelpi: You once said “I feel that it is more important to establish relations to what I did in the past instead of satisfying the equation new show = new works.”** Why did you choose About Angels and Airplanes to be presented in the Bienal de São Paulo modernist pavilion?
Mircea Cantor: I think it’s the right piece, at the right moment in the right place. I work pretty much by intuition. Being aware of the context of modernism and the concept of the 28th Bienal de São Paulo, the questions I might pose are: What is tradition? What is the tradition of the handicraft of mankind? What is the red line that links us to the past, extending from the past through the present to the future? At the same time, I’m interested in the feeling of surprise: What is a flying carpet doing here, how did it get here? Did it fly over the ocean to get here?
Bartolomeo Gelpi: In the same interview you said, “A key moment has come to Eastern European art as it enters the realm of Western art.” And later on, “When I use certain themes derived from my culture, I don’t want to export pain, but to stress the fact that what happened there and still happens elsewhere can be described as part of a universal language.” Since Brazil seems to be experiencing a similar key moment, what do you see as being Brazilian art’s contribution to this universal language?
Mircea Cantor: I don’t know. I’ve been to Brazil for only a couple of days, and I don’t know the people’s smile. Intuition is the key to this universal language. We are all connected by different kinds of systems of values being material or immaterial, but what brings us together? I don’t think it is globalism, but something that overpasses it. I believe that behind Brazilian art, or any national specific art, there is something that has nothing to do with the geo-national context. And that can be a departure point.
* QUINTIN, Françoise; MIRCAN, Mihnea; GRIGORESCU, Ion.
Mircea Cantor. Champagne-Ardenne: frac, 2007.
** ROBOTTINI, Alessandro.
Flash Art, Nov-Dec, 2006.
Bartolomeo Gelpi is a painter, graduated in Fine Arts by the Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado (FAAP). He acted as a curatorial assistant at the 28TH Bienal de São Paulo.
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