Bogdan Luca’s work is meant to be challenging. At first sight, the exhibition feels like peering into a beautiful world, in which we encounter an idyllic picnic in the park, a day out on a rowboat or a lively dinner party. However, the longer you look at the paintings, the more you start to have the feeling that something is a little off.
Installation view of Bogdan Luca: The Green Suitcase at The Red Head Gallery
Bogdan Luca and his mother immigrated to Canada in 1996 from Romania, bringing with them a suitcase full of old family photographs. In the entryway of The Red Head Gallery, a small painting of this suitcase greets you. The canvas is hung high, above eye level and just out of reach. The suitcase is emerald green with unclasped silver latches, its contents spilling out onto an undisclosed bright pink surface. Placed on the adjacent wall of the gallery, Subject Files (1-12), is a grid of smaller paper works tacked to the gallery wall — each showing a bird’s-eye view of photographs piled on top of one another. We can imagine the artist studying these black-and-white photographs taken by his grandfather in the early 1940s and 50s, trying to decide which ones to transform into colour.
Bogdan Luca, Baggage, oil and mixed media on canvas, 30 x 24 inches
The rest of the show consists of six paintings — cinematic recreations of Luca’s grandfather’s photographs. Viewers glide from one painting to the next, each work taking an individual wall in the small gallery space. The works are unframed, creating the impression that the thick eddies of purple, deep blue, and green paint spill out onto the gallery’s pristine white walls. Patches of neon paint make the room vibrate slightly, while metallic elements — collaged into the works — glint when viewed at the right angle.
From afar, Bogdan Luca’s paintings look like perfectly whole images — mimetic depictions of the photographs they represent. As you approach them, the forms shift and become fluid, faces blur and spaces melt. In Traverse, a boat floats on a body of water. Take a step closer and the water splits into swirls of blue, white, and orange. If we squint, the water congeals once more. In the space between the boaters, Luca leaves the canvas deliberately empty. Is this an opening into a liminal space? Or an indication that perhaps Luca’s representations are meant to be incomplete? While the people in the boat are depicted figuratively, the surrounding water and landscape seems almost abstract.
Bogdan Luca, Traverse, oil on canvas, 63 x 50 inches
In viewing Cabal, we seem to be interrupting a dinner or some kind of celebration. A dining table with a white tablecloth overflows with drinks. One of the people wears a formal blue suit and tie that Middle-Europeans wear only on special occasions. These are the only hints of celebration. Elsewhere the mood is dark and sombre. The attendees’ faces are obscured. The shape of a nose is suggested, a brow hinted at. An ominous figure waits in the right corner, his blue head is blurred into the blue of the room around him. In the upper righthand corner, the number “1” is circled against a wash of highlighter-yellow paint. Key to Luca’s work seems to be a deliberate ambiguity in defining spaces and locations. We are never quite sure if we are looking at the sky or the ground, if we are inside or outside.
Bogdan Luca, Cabal, oil on canvas, 55 x 67 inches
In Objective of Interest, three men in suits are engaged in a secretive conversation. The tallest figure’s head has been circled; an eerie “X” appears above one of the others. Luca’s grandfather made these markings on the original photographs and the artist takes care to include them in his painting. The artist’s grandfather worked for the communist government in Romania between the 1950s and 1970s as a detector of spies. Could these marks indicate the identity of these people? More likely, and by including them in his painting, Luca points to the layers of interpretation and also makes his representation somewhat historical.
Bogdan Luca, Objective of Interest, oil paint on canvas, 63 x 50 inches
In my favourite work, One bread, one party, Luca depicts a picnic in a park. The colours are loud, the paint is thick, applied in chunky waves, causing the disintegration of the faces of the participants. And yet, the figures are quiet. They do not look at each other, nor do they talk. Judging by the mood it might be a farewell party. The woman at the centre of the composition seems to beckon us inward with a chip or apple slice or a salty cracker — even here Luca keeps it a secret. As we allow our eyes to be guided toward her, we see more details. A disembodied leg kicks out from the foreground of the painting. The foot sports a blue and orange New Balance sneaker (that you couldn’t buy in Romania at that time), as though kicking out at us from a different time — like a portal has opened up within Luca’s painting, and someone has stuck his leg through. We might imagine the rest of the body following next. With one little anachronistic addition, Luca disrupts reality and telescopes time.
Bogdan Luca, One bread, one party, oil on canvas, 70 x 54 inches
In other works, scraps of ornamental paper stick to the painted forms – creating more confusion folded into the texture of the painting. Luca’s work resists realism and challenges easy resolve. These textured zones embed a shakiness which draws out the liminality of the spaces Luca seeks to depict as he shifts between abstraction and figuration, between the past and the present. There is also something eerie about Luca’s works. Perhaps it is us sneaking into these private worlds. And yet, each work has one figure looking out of the realm of painting, watching us.
Shakuntala Fernandopulle
Images are courtesy of the artist.
*Exhibition information: Bogdan Luca, The Green Suitcase. March 1 – 25, 2023, The Read Head Gallery, 401 Richmond St, West, Suite 115, Toronto. Gallery hours: Wed – Sat 12 – 5 pm.