Razvan Boar
The perfunctory status of drawing is transposed, manipulated, and parodied in the new body of work by Romanian artist Razvan Boar. Though Boar’s practice is distinctly painterly his approach to gesture reveals a critical engagement with the contemporary currency of ‘the hand’. A certain automatism, a nearly Ab-Ex approach to mark making, is employed throughout Boar’s compositions, levying their figurative and topical subject matter into a dynamic interplay between notions of configuration and sublimation.
Boar approaches gesture with a furtive hand. Utilizing the figurative skeletons of 1950’s advertising iconography, his work confronts the role of ‘the study’ as means to an end and further, as painterly prerequisite. Blurred is the line between drawing and painting in Boar’s iconoscapes; leveling media hierarchy, he uses oil paint with a lightness of hand usually associated with graphite or ink. It is through this material tension that the work subsumes within itself into the arena of contemporary vestige or relic; lines become primitive, color symbolic, patterns emerge and a distinct visual rhythm is introduced.
Boar uses color specifically to demarcate and outline his renderings, democratizing his subject matter and formally unifying his planes.
The crude immediacy of Boar’s technique yet deft skills as a draftsman summon the viewer into a conceptual quagmire where style and substance thematically contradict one another. One is unsure as to whether or not the aggregate compositions of Boar’s pictorial planes are approached with an intention that seeks to coalesce or destroy, associate or disassociate. It is within this inquisitional space that Boar’s paintings find a distinct objecthood, one which expands beyond the realm of painting into something more conjectural.
Razvan Boar (b.1982, Lugoj) lives and works in Bucharest, Romania. Recent exhibitions include, Classification Bouillabaisse (2013), Ana Cristea Gallery. In 2011 Boar was the recipient of the Constantin Brancusi fellowship at Cite Internationale des Arts, Paris