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Andor Komives – Romania

Visual Artist

My name is Andor Komives. I am from Cluj, Romania. I am a professor in the University of Art and Design in Cluj, but I like to play with a lot of media, so I could call myself a visual artist more than a painter although I love to paint.

What can I say about my work? Well, I am in a lot of danger in a sense. I am using different characters and using something mixed like collage, because our life is like a collage. I like to use imagery from cartoons, from temporary mythology, but my characters are talking or putting a question to provoke you. I am ironical, but sometimes I am very practical, so it meets not only in one person, but in many personalities.

I like to play with these things, but I want to express my work, my fear, what I live in. I like to react to them. For that reason, I put Superman, Mickey Mouse, or Lenin and others in different situations. I put together these things, but for someone it could seem these are images for children, but it is not, because I want to provoke a kind of reaction.

So I am using art as a method to communicate with others. I think it is important. A long time ago, I thought it was not good to make something from what is our own days, that it was too much in fashion. But now I think it is important for me to have a reaction. My work is ironical; a soft irony; I am not cynical….but I am partly a cynical guy. I studied Paradise for my doctoral thesis. It was about the temptation of Paradise. But my Paradise is not so sweet, not so kitsch right now. I am looking for a real sense of Paradise now, right now. I am not waiting for Paradise when I will be dead. I am looking for Paradise now and for that reason I am very critical of contemporary Paradises—Contemporary art full of kitsch and sex and vulgar meaning.

This is me. I feel that art can be created, not as suffering like in the Romantic Period, but full of energy and life.

Email: andor_komives@yahoo.com www.andorkomives.ro