Dan Perjovschi: Drawings at the Water Plant
Exhibition and Artist Talk, 28 May – 19 June 2015
Centre for Architecture, Urban Culture and Landscape, Suceava

Dan Perjovschi’s drawings are as precise as formulae in mathematics or physics. EI AUr NOI ciaNUră (They have gold, we get cyanide – which in capital letters reads They have, we don’t). What can be more effective than a minimum of signs cunningly put together to condense and illustrate, at the same time, ideas and situations as complex as the relation between matter, energy, space and time? Dan wants to know now and wants to share what he knows in two seconds.

Indeed, the urgency is concrete, for many reasons: forests are cut for political votes, universities are becoming businesses, public properties and services (energy resources, parks and gardens, medical services, research facilities, the law-making and judicial systems) are continuously undermined for private profit, and the arrests of corrupt politicians, businessmen and local authorities’ representatives are increasing exponentially – in Romania. The rest of the world is not doing any better either: social inequality deepens dramatically, religious fanatism and xenophobia swell, the irresponsible exploatation of natural resources carries on, mass surveillance has become endemic, and democracy barely resists the specre of global war.

Dan travels day and night, locally and globally, as a field reporter; he observes, documents, reads the news, in print and online, talks to ordinary folk, posts on facebook, filters sources and images, extracts the essence and creates in flux. He is a performer, present in the world’s bewildering vortex, and the madness of this world is his topic whilst drawing is his thinking space.

No cause is too little for him and his activism is contagious: Save Roșia Montana campaigners have downloaded his drawings, pinned them on t-shirts and printed them on protest sign boards; in Cluj, students exhibited his drawings Occupy University in the lecture theatres where they stated their manifestos; in Istanbul, Occupy Gezi demonstrators asked him to draw for them, as did rioters from Rio against the corrupt Brazilian government.

With an alert critical conscioussness, generosity and humour, Dan Perjovschi debates, confronts and presents the world as it is, as we don’t see it in the quotidian rush, but we can recognize if we stop for two seconds and enter in the thinking spaces drawn by the artist. On walls, floors, windows, ceilings, on the pavement, on facades, in newspapers, in books, on the Internet, on any surface, with chalk, markers, white, black, grey. The drawings are erased, the ideas are not.