MARIUS LEHENE, CRISTIAN PORUMB, MIHAIL TOMESCU. OTHER LIVES / Alte vieți

The Art Museum in Cluj-Napoca (MACN), a public cultural institution that operates under the authority of the Cluj County Council, organizes, between 11 – 22 September, 2024, the group exhibition of the painters Marius Lehene, Cristian Porumb and Mihail Tomescu, entitled “Other Lives / Alte vieți”.  

The opening of the exhibition will take place on Wednesday, September 11th, 2024, at 05:00 PM, in the “Temporary” Halls of the Bánffy Palace (Unirii Square no. 30), in the presence of the exhibiting artists and their special guest: Oliv Mircea, reputed art critic, essayist and editor, curator of contemporary art exhibitions, director of the Arcade 24 Gallery, titular member of the “art criticism” section of the Cluj-Bistrița-Zalău Intercounty Branch of the Romanian Visual Artists Union (U.A.P.) and president of the Bistrița Association of the same professional organization of creators in the field of visual arts. On behalf of the institution, the hostess of the evening will be the museographer Alexandra Sârbu.    

“«Other Lives / Alte Vieți» is a project that brings together recent works by three painters from Cluj – Cristian Porumb, Mihail Tomescu, and Marius Lehene. The former still lives and works in Cluj, while the latter two, though occasionally in Cluj, are active predominantly in the United States. Soon after 1989 they worked in the same studio for several years and overlapped at the University of Art and Design. That was another life as a consequence of which the artists have in common certain aspects concerning the relation with the materiality of painting and with the moods and attitudes at the root of their artistic motivations. The otherness in the exhibition title alludes, generally speaking, to the relationship between making art inside one’s native country versus doing so as expats. The project is, simultaneously (also dialectically), approaching the differences and similarities between the work practices of the three, the discrepancies and dissonances between their life and art-related experiences, and also the literary allusions or inspirations at the basis of some series of works presented here, from Homer and Goethe, to Kafka, Celan or the Jataka myths.

At the beginning of the nineties, a walk on the English shore of the North Sea provokes in the writing of W.G. Sebald a series of tangents, some autobiographical, others literary, historical and scientific. Sebald's attention seems to repeatedly slips away in a centrifugal fashion, often proceeding from immediate materiality, to other spaces and other lives, towards – to paraphrase Max Blecher – an equally immediate unreality. Blecher and Sebald are not the only ones who travel in the company of such alterities. Certainly, so did the polytrope Ulysses who inspires Porumb. So travel all of us. Off on the voyage, on one or more simultaneous tangents, are also Cristian Porumb, Mihai Tomescu, and Marius Lehene. The trajectory of these artistic and biographical tangents starts from the circumference of the same circle. This was a local artistic circle where the three artists worked in the early 90s and which included the world of the then "Ion Andreescu" Art Academy (now the University of Art and Design – Cluj). Like Blecher and Sebald, they carry a historical and personal load or charge. It is possible that this charge accumulated before and immediately after 1989 and understood as an ambiguity between accumulating and giving a mission, is what carried two of them, Tomescu and Lehene, in the diaspora, and induced in the third, Porumb, an attraction to the mythology of wandering.

The predilect theme of the three artists is that of memory, alternatively understood as personal or collective. The artistic interests of Porumb, Tomescu and Lehene are rooted in a partially shared biography, in an artistic and intellectual formation from Cluj, and in the same Zeitgeist that we all live as citizens of the globalized world”, it is shown in the concept proposed for the present project by the three exhibiting artists.