The cycle of paintings entitled Sunny Day at Hanging Rock explicitly refers to the Australian writer Joan Lindsay’s book, “Picnic at Hanging Rock”, which has been adapted to film twice by now. The plot of the novel is set around the unexplained disappearance of three girls who attended a picnic organised by their schoolteacher in the 1900s. Dan Voinea’s eleven oil paintings on canvas take up the theme of the picnic, but take it back to the 1960s and 1980s. Pier Paolo Pasolini used the same method of dressing (foreign) themes in contemporary clothes at the beginning of his film Oedipus the King.
Dan Voinea’s paintings are like photographic snapshots capturing family members at leisure.
 
Text: Valentin Trifescu
 
ENCOUNTERLESS
Dan Voinea’s preoccupation with a critical discourse on the system of existence in contemporary societies is already well known. His favourite themes target the crisis of meaning and stake and the captivity of the human condition in increasingly artificial environments. Potential authenticity is crushed and defused, buried in artifacts, and his works capture this waste, the absurd and horizonless movement of the individual through the vacuum generated by social gears. Obsessive-inevitable themes of the moment: alienation, the abysmal distance between individual consciousness and the actual modes of coexistence and subsistence, nostalgia for a nature that has become inaccessible, self-blindness, the discontinuous and fragmented biographical paths that cannot form a destiny, the accidental becoming the common-sense measure for human interactions describe the orbit of the artist's demarches in the last decade. The Sunny Day at Hanging Rock series captures snapshots of loneliness, of non-encounters, in a seemingly idyllic atmosphere, where the characters seem charged with solar energies. But there is no connection between them, no unifying, relational element, each is trapped in a parallel universe. Dan Voinea’s works decant the theme of estrangement in a contemporary key, building visual allegories in which day reveries are undermined by the interference of the virtual environment, which jams, infests and parasitizes it. What disappears, through slow disintegration, in his works is not a specific incarnation, a human presence, but real existence itself. The human imagination is corrupted, colonized by the visual effects produced by technological simulations. The colours, garishly and ostentatiously artificial and in a reduced palette, speak of contemporary man's attempt to produce a second nature or to “cosmeticize” and "retouch" the natural order and ends by emitting only sterile schematizations, emptied of sap. Even the warm tones have something metallic, aggressive, distant, something uncanny, a shade of sickness.
Natural reality is invaded by the artificiality: mummified. Snapshots are not immortalizations, like frames frozen in time, but hypostasis of some situational frames decomposed at level of communicating core, reduced to mechanical expressions, reproduced without any existential weight or any vital element able to cause sensitive reactions. In this way, the artist alludes to the mechanicity, inconsistency and lack of substance, to the “unbearable lightness” of the billions of snapshots expelled every moment in virtual networks. They are not reproductions of a vivid moment, but copies of copies of copies of it. The idea of the artist, in line with the vision of Jean Baudrillard in “Simulacra”, critically reveals the fact that in contemporary environments, the image, instead of opening the doors of perception to delve into the deeper dimensions of reality, making the invisible visible, as happened in other ages when art was the path to introspection and epiphanies, it ended up blocking the access to sensible reality, they fake and distort the perception, manipulate it.
 
Ilinca Bernea