Roman Tolici. “Forever Young”

Artactmagazine.ro, 4. March 2009

“His moustache is the easiest to recognize – and the most sinister – from the whole of history”, this is how the verdict of the journalist Tony Paterson falls in the opening of the recently published article from The Telegraph. You guessed it: the distinctive moustache that we are talking about is that of Hitler, but contrary to the rumours circulated up to the other day, it seems that the Führer appropriated to himself the pattern in cause (to the disadvantage of a previous bushy Prussian moustache) not as much to align himself to a fashion of the time, as to respect, in his turn, the recommendations of those who procure a gas mask against the unpredictable British attacks. The explication, abrupt as it is, was delivered together with the biography edited by an ex trench comrade of Hitler’s during the First World War, the writer Alexander Moritz Frey. Is it true that, juggled (before and after) by Chaplin precisely due to its amusing quality (leaving aside the fact that the dimensions, as well, permitted the “bearer” sufficient liberty of facial expression), “Hitler’s moustache” stirred a long series of mythologies and attitudes, however – beyond the anecdotic and the fashion of the shaping of the facial expression – seen today, the history of the appearance/disappearance of the spikes from the face promises to the most interested one by the phenomenon various conclusions referring to a psychological-behavioural registry who’s key-words can be, among others: maturity (sometimes too hastily announced), the sobriety imagined or even confirmed, the symbolic authority (subsequent to its consummation on a practical order), guarantee of sovereignty, displayed political alliance, subsuming of the cleric registry, sportsmanship, clientele, assumed subversion, neglect or a simple mask.

You will ask yourselves, of course, where do I want to get, which would be – according to the introduction – the relation between “presentation” and “to present”; how do we define, in other words, the chemistry of the “rejuvenation/aging” process, as an alternative to that of “naturalisation”. In short, what is (still) left after the “waving”, what we (still) validate (after years and years), what we (still) enthrone after dethronement. The challenge launched by Roman Tolici together with a series of watercolours “Barber’s Shop”, exposed beside some of the painting pieces caught under the title “Action” in Berlin, at the Collectiva Gallery (www.collectivagallery.com) is related to the game: the artist’s discourse amends the format recorded in the collective memory, from here or from elsewhere, of those you have shaped (positively or negatively) modernity. It has no sense, I know, to confiscate now the space in favour of some parentheses from another movie. I want to say that here, without being neither hasty, not pretentious; neither naughty (intellectually) nor detached (visually); neither challengingly anchored in the real(ity) nor comfortably attached to the solemn registry; neither undermined by virtuosity (technique) nor fooled by the hyper-consuming (conceptually) – Tolici’s approach has the ease of the one less preoccupied by the delivery of some ideas as by the understanding, in the private order of the shop, of things in their own flux. Old – thematic (the portrait), traditional as format, more than irritable (in the eyes of many) as a technical option and solution – the set of drawings “Barber’s Shop” descends those whose height we can’t reach (sometimes because we don’t even want to). To negotiate the will/ambition of such a leap doesn’t equalise, in Roman Tolici’s case, to a simple recipe (just) right to deliver, as displaying yourself as being smart/strong/genius doesn’t guarantee to anyone your intangibility further on. “We are equals in the faith of the fact that we are above, different, distanced, immortals” – seem to say, all together both Adolf, and Claude, and Edgar, and Fidel, and Lev, and Salvador. The counter-current is optimal, the farce has its hygiene..

Oana Tanase