Gicu - 2023

05 – 29 October 2023

Curator: Diana Dochia

The personal exhibition "GICU" signed by Matei Arnăutu for the exhibition space in the mansard of the House Filipescu-Cesianu, which currently houses the Museum of the Ages, establishes a subtle dialogue with the pieces from the museum collection, exhibits highlighting over 300 years of childhood, family and intimate life.

The exhibition is, in a certain sense, a continuation of the personal exhibition from 2022 entitled "Anonymous opus manuum artificis", which had place at Anaid Art Gallery, this time the artist Matei Arnăutu documenting Gicu  Stanciu's workshop, nicknamed the "The Genius from the Carpathians". Gicu's attempts to produce free energy have led to the appearance, over several decades, of several objects, fragments with the status of study, tools, bearings, wheels, etc., all with the aim of using them to fulfill the utopian mission of get energy from nothing. Mechanic's concern for invention and innovation, doubled by bending towards hoarding (hoarding) led to the appearance of spaces filled with objects, both in work areas and and in the mechanic's yard. From the meetings of the artist Matei Arnăutu with Gicu, nicknamed by the locals "Genius from the Carpathians", resulted in a series of photographs in the mechanic's workshop, as well as in the car yard/graveyard of it, the artist confessing: "10 years ago I entered the mechanic's workshop for the first time Gosh. From the first moment I had a surprise. In the middle of the room, on a makeshift pedestal made of the remains of some appliances, there was a turned bicycle wheel. The image of Duchamp's wheel came to me immediately in mind. Then I noticed certain details that made the difference between the two wheels. The mechanic explained to me that his wheel was actually a technical experiment, done in an attempt to get a perpetuum mobile, with the aim of generating free energy. I knew since then that this is - proven scientifically - impossible. But the resemblance to Duchamp's work and the candor remained in my mind, the inventiveness and humanity of the mechanic. Apart from the surprise of the wheels, others followed as well the mechanic was showing me his inventions. Since then I have wanted to photograph his workshop".

The exhibition develops on two coordinates, with a series of different artistic photographs being exhibited dimensions, made by Matei Arnăutu, documenting the mechanic's workshop and part of the ready-made objects/inventions created by the mechanic Gicu. In this context, the exhibition proposes two grids of reading, the one from the Duchampian perspective, in which an ordinary object, exhibited in the museum setting, becomes a the work of art and that from the perspective of Joseph Beuys' famous phrase "Every man is an artist", on who would explain it at length, in 1973, as follows: "Only art is able to dismantle the repressive effects of a senile social system, which continues to teeter on the line of death: to dismantle in order to build

A SOCIAL ORGANIZATION AS A WORK OF ART. This artistic discipline among the most modern - Social Sculpture/Social Architecture - will only come to fruition when every living person will become a creator, a sculptor or an architect of the social organism". Filtered by interpretation mode of the two - Duchamp and Beuys - the objects built by the mechanic Gicu and exhibited in the museum are invested with the attributes of works of art, which give them the status of social sculptures, which enter into dialogue directly with the photos signed by Matei Arnăutu, which can be interpreted in this context as a artistic document of anthropological archaeology.