A History in the Dark
Artist: Tara (von Neudorf)
Curator: Diana Dochia
08.04.2010 – 07.05.2010
Opening: 08.04.2010, at 07:30 p.m.
The Lesson
A History in the Dark announces a new facet of Tara von Neudorf’s creation. Continuing the series begun in the projects Finis Mundi and Into the Night of Loneliness, Tara passes over maps and objects found in the Transylvanian churches, to the botanic, zoology and anatomic sketches. Thus the drawing is conditioned by the existing image on the sketch’s surface, erupting as part of a vegetable carnivore and an anatomical visceral body. This time the conflict is concealed in an extremely complicated and coded drawing. The mystery is revealed in stages and the extended silence portends the disaster. Tara identifies himself completely with the sketch of which he takes possession. The drawing interpenetrates with the existing one developing a succession of entrelacs and labyrinthine coils. Recurrent creational elements of Tara von Neudorf are to be found in this project: rats, lizards, fishes, snakes which turn into women, apples, the symbol of the original sin, and the disembowel human body turned dreadfully into an industrial mechanism. One element proceeds another, from a lizard is born a snake, the ornithorhyncus is metamorphosed into an angel, the rat turns into a bat, the owl predicts death. All it happens with fantastic rapidity describing a trophyc chain often incongruent within a rhizomic system.
Starting from the philosophic concept developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari within the project the Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972-1980), the rhizome becomes a term used to describe a multiplicity with nonhierarchical entrances and exits. New grid of interpretation stems from what Deleuze named “image of thought”, the rhizome being a concept which opposites the concept of arborescent knowledge which works with dual categories and binary choices. The rhizome work with horizontal connections and trans- species, while the arborescent model work with vertical and linear connections. Taking over the biological concept of mutualism, two different species interact in order to form a multiplicity; in other words, a unity which multiplies itself. The majority of Tara’s drawings built on the idea of infinite multiplicity. Each of his drawings can be connected with another element or anything else. It is possible to make infinite mental analogies both at the image level and at symbolic interpretation level. Each element added or dropped leads to a certain problem which, at any moment can be reinterpreted and contextualized. Similar to the disruption within the rhizomic system, Tara’s drawings develop the capacity to create a wild beast image. The rhizomic system developed by Deleuze and Guattari conception mark a horizontal and nonhierarchical, where anything can be linked to something else, since we are dealing with heterogeneous relations between things, which at first sight have nothing in common. There is in Tara’s creation one another permanent transfer of organic elements that change and often metamorphose within a true artistic creativity that depict a chaotic world, with vegetative roots that multiplies infinitely. Finding maps in the project Finis Mundi or a great number of didactic botanic, zoological or anatomical sketches represent only pretext for Tara to imagine an eternity of darkness in the world. The black deep hatch of the drawings translates the opposition between total affection for the tackled subjects and the monstrosity described. The irrepressible spirit, solitary, prying, unquiet, using violation without interdictions Tara feels in peace only in Engelthal (The Angels Valley) – the only idyllic imagine in the exhibition. The experience of visually reading the artistic words of Tara oscillates between direct, unrefined reading, and fantasy, dreaming, imagining psychologies and different habits.
A History in the Dark is a kind of sociology and retrospective anthropology of human delirium. Tara can draw more than we can imagine. Tara develops in large areas the world, around this fixed point. The world with its innumerable interpenetrations reveals the “universe of Tara”, within each art work taken at random; develops an organic structure and a unique tonality.
Curator: Diana Dochia