REMODERN Teodor Graur "New Thing"
Old Court Gallery, opening Tuesday, April 13th, 18.00.

Modernism is the ideological and the stylistic victorious faction in the last hundred years. All of us are modern style living. Even the fans of returning to old values are living now the scratch-clouds and do Internet browsing. Whether it refers to liberalism, science, communication, development, planning, design, technology, or comfort, fashion, sports, entertainment, consumerism, criticism, humor and hedonism, modernism - in all its aspects - marks the current lifestyle boundaries. With ideals and utopias, its products and its progressive ambitions, the vocation to defining new dynamism and modernism, holds us captive in an invisible cage boundless freedom that makes us overlook the reverse, chaos, discrimination, crisis handling, demagogy, obscurantism, violence, regression, authoritarianism, always present in the body of a civilization which go on, triumphal marching.

The distance between the utopia, the ideals of modernism, and the reality of modern life, the collision of new as obsession and the fatigue novelty - supplies the opera of the “Great Recycler” Teodor Graur. This distance is imperceptible when the latest model of television set is placed in a duplex freshly opened. But what really happens when a TV sit in the same duplex that was yesterday, or the day before yesterday, the latest model? Or one that was the last model 50 years ago?That one got the same aspiration to incorporate an absolute novelty, with its tip technology (now revoluta), with its pleasing forms (now embarrassing), the usefulness and the ideality (now hilarious) raised as a banner of progress (now the trash ).

The clash between nice progress today and yesterday produced a shivering consciousness into the dubitative objects, sardonically bricolate by Teodor Graur. He re-presents modernity as a still life, skilfully combining ambitions with disabilities, propensities, diversions and regression, just to highlight the new old-fashioned rhetoric, the mania of innovation, information, for the pleasure and comfort - that traces ideals and pathology of modernism. For Teodor Graur, modernism is a theme like "vanitas". His objects produced by the discovery of a secret nature of counter-kind appearance, have the apearence of ultimate allegory to funerary monuments. Maximum recycler, Teodor Graur is, at the same time, the artist who pompously embalm the modernism. Now mummy, the modernism says more about vanity and transitory nature of the new, about easily convinced and always exciting that the new(est) thing can again be left to resist, to transcend the ephemeral abundance and limitless consumption.

Remodern is a funeral ode, but whistled with smiling. Teodor Graur recovers the modernism in order to reveal its deleted gloss, the worn ideas and forms, but also the grandeur (already faded) of its ambitions at present, when consumption became the key and measure of progress. Somewhat melancholic, nostalgic Remodern makes visible the instability and caducity of innovation, of ideas and beautiful modernist forms, just by storing them with a cold love, sarcastic, applied, uncompromising and sometimes treacherous, as that of Teodor Graur.

Erwin Kessler