Whitehot Magazine
"The Best Art In The World"
Daniel Moldoveanu, Rude Awakening, Installation view, 2024, Invitro, Bucharest, Documentation: YAP studio /Pavel Curagau
By TRAVIS JEPPESEN January 20, 2025
In the center of Bucharest sits the Malmaison building, a former political prison where horrendous acts of torture took place in the years of Romania’s communist dictatorship. Today, in an act of spiritual cleansing, the building, with its cell-like rooms, has been transposed into artist studios and galleries. On the flipside of such redemption projects is, of course, the threat of historical erasure – a vulnerability that all post-totalitarian societies are forced to grapple with when it comes to the urban built environment. How, then, to tastefully undertake such an act of rehabilitation, acknowledging the ghosts that inevitably haunt such a place, satiating the living’s needs to heal the wounds inflicted by history’s brutalities, while somehow applying, however obliquely, those lessons to the travails of the present?
Daniel Moldoveanu, Rude Awakening, Installation view, 2024, Invitro, Bucharest, Documentation: YAP studio /Pavel Curagau
An exhibition by the young Berlin-based Romanian artist Daniel Moldoveanu ambitious takes on this challenge, transforming two rooms into claustrophobic holding cells. In each, a “prisoner” manifests in the form of a mannequin – though they are just as likely to be prisoners of our post-globalized era of dire uncertainties, clothed in textile prints comprised of collaged imagery sourced from AI, as well as neoprene animal masks that look like they may have been acquired from a sex shop.
Working across media – in painting, drawing, sculpture, video, and installation, while maintaining a prolific practice as an essayist – Moldoveanu provocatively embraces superficiality as an activistic mechanism, a shield against the encroaching darkness of nihilism that has bubbled to the surface as the twenty-first century’s starkest existential threat. “Rude Awakening,” the title of this present solo exhibition, represents yet a further intrusion into the depths of the corroded surfaces that surround us; that comprise us. Each of the two rooms has a different feel. The smaller of the two is more condensed, and thus, more experientially intense, in terms of both its contents and the feelings they provoke: the mannequin is seated on a wooden platform, staring at the clock installed on the other side of the wall, on the face of which is a monochromatic pencil drawing capturing the movement of several cartoonlike male figures mapped on to a single body, their extended limbs necessitating an optical pause to parse their enshrouded being-forms. On the multi-platformed floors, scattered throughout, seemingly random arrangements of heavy wooden bricks have been placed. This is a hauntological inference of a rather advanced psychological torture mechanism once employed on the premises that Moldoveanu discovered while researching the history of the building. Bricks would be randomly bolted down to the floors of these cells to prevent prisoners from pacing around. Though one’s freedom might be deprived, pacing at least gives one’s mind freedom to roam; by restricting the ability to pace, psychological freedom is effectively curtailed. In such an advanced science of sadism, one is imprisoned both physically and mentally, unable to contemplate beyond the confines in which one is entrapped.
Daniel Moldoveanu, Rude Awakening, Installation view, 2024, Invitro, Bucharest, Documentation: YAP studio /Pavel Curagau
The desire to pace, to outrun the confines of the present, the realities of the world that entraps us, serves as a sort of reaction to the radiational haze of mediated reality that flattens everything on the level of perception; anxiety and frustration being the two most common mental illnesses of our age. Social media, fake news, now AI: all tools for advancing a depthlessness that threatens to swallow every atom and pixel, flattening everyone and everything into flatline submission. Even collage, that artform that most revels in texture, comes across as flat. In the slightly larger of the two rooms, the standing mannequin faces the dual-paneled painting Untitled Wallpaper (white, gray, shades of gray), 2024. A piece from Moldoveanu’s ongoing painting cycle on large canvases, which juxtaposes hundreds of cartoon-like figures, then works to conceal them beneath floral motifs: obscure landscapes of peopled ruin in wallpaper drag. A few other paintings and drawings adorn this room, and on closer inspection, a peculiar body horror emerges: these cartoonish beings, colliding in ether, fucking and fighting and merging into unitary multi-limbed figures. One pencil drawing, Untitled (John Tenniel, Tom of Finland), 2024, finds two of Tom’s leather daddies congealing into the frog footman from Tenniel’s illustrations of Alice in Wonderland. Far from merely exhibiting his disparate works, Moldoveanu has instead staged an elaborate present-day drama with this former prison as the backdrop; all the artworks – even the clothing adorning the mannequins, with their fragments of barely discernible cultural signifiers – serve as actors.
Daniel Moldoveanu, Rude Awakening, Installation view, 2024, Invitro, Bucharest, Documentation: Nastase Razvan
As is often the case with classical tragedy, the resolution leads back to us. Moldoveanu offers no resolution – art never does, at least when it’s good; and when it tries to, it loses the title of art and becomes propaganda – an awareness to which those born out of post-totalitarian trauma are probably more readily attuned. Perhaps we, like the figures frequenting Moldoveanu’s work, are all archetypes devoid of context – or else imprisoned by that very context-lack, those substitutes for the real that buffer our daily peregrinations through existences rendered largely meaningless in the approach to death. The totalitarianisms of the past have given way to a totalitarianism of the mind, enabled by the neoliberal apparatus and its ever-encroaching technosis. And when we try to lift a brick to take aim at our captors or at least momentarily free us to wander, we find they are bolted down. WM
Travis Jeppesen's novels include The Suiciders, Wolf at the Door, and Victims. He is the recipient of a 2013 Arts Writers grant from Creative Capital/the Warhol Foundation. In 2014, his object-oriented writing was featured in the 2014 Whitney Biennial and in a solo exhibition at Wilkinson Gallery in London. A collection of novellas, All Fall, is forthcoming from Publication Studio.
view all articles from this author