15.10.

2018 (99) Ionita - Notes

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Gernik Art Camp 2018, Highlights and

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IONITA · MONDAY, OCTOBER 15, 2018 19 Reads

The following material is the first part of a review in English about the Gernik Art Camp
2018, with introduction and notes about Costin Brateanu (RO), Julie Glassberg (FR), Vlado
and Rajka Poljak Franjević (LIE), Larisa Telipan (RU) and Agata Czeremuszkin-Chrut
(PL). The second part of the review will follow soon and will cover the participation to the
event of Petra Klepcová (SK), Vasile Pintea (RO), Marie Šeborová (CZE), Vladimira
Josefiova (CZE), Barbora Mališová (CZE), Igor Isac (RO) and Mirela Sorina Barna (RO).
The material is under publishing in Banatul Azi and Academia.edu

The 14th edition of the Creative Artistic Camp from Gernik, Caraş-Severin, Romania, took
place between September 7-15, 2018. On the poster, the event is presented as Gernik Art
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Camp. The word camp appeared in the ancient French in 1520 and meant a place where the
army temporarily settled in tents or cottages.

For today's artists, a camp means either a camp site, either a colony, residence, or artistic
symposium. The term symposium - commonly used for intellectual discussions or
conferences on a given topic - is also popular in the world of visual artists, especially
sculptors.

In 1959 , on the top of a quarry located in St. Margarethen, a town in the state of
Burgenland, Austria, the sculptor Karl Prantl initiated the first international sculpture
symposium in the world. Prantl came up with this idea to facilitate communication between
sculptors at a time when the European cultural dialogue under the tensions of the Cold War
needed an opening.

His Sankt Margarethen initiative, where, for a determined period of time, sculptors worked
and lived under the same roof, sharing ideas about aesthetics and sculpture technology,
would become a global phenomenon and today, in the midst of European transformation,
Romania became a hotspot of similar initiatives. The Gernik Art Camp is one of them.

The curator and artist Costin Brăteanu, a young artist from Timişoara, Romania, the
initiator of the art camp from Gernik is one of the most active cultural promoters in
Romania. In addition to participating at prestigious artistic camps abroad, Hungary, Greece,
Austria, Turkey, Egypt, India or the United Arab Emirates, Costin Brateanu is the curator of
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Gernik Art Camp (13 editions), Stefan Jäger Art Symposium (6 editions), the Transylvania
Art Camp (first edition) and the International Art Symposium Tigami Lala in Marrakech
(2015).

He gained this track record by building close contacts with artists, mayors, local decision-
makers or private sponsors. At Gernik he succeeded in establishing a durable artistic event, a
success secured not only by the magnificent landscape where live 300 pemi families,
descendants of the Czechs colonized in the Banat Mountains by the former Austro-
Hungarian Empire, but also by his friendship with the locals, Nicolae Tismanariu the mayor
of Gernik, and Gabriel Lungu, a businessman who owns the Gernik Guesthouse where the
artists are housed.

The selection of the current edition includes artists from France, the Czech Republic,
Lichtenstein, Slovakia, Russia, Poland and Romania. What is unique about Costin
Brăteanu's selection are not just considerations related to ethnicity, experience, level of
education or age, but also those related to forms of artistic expression which, along painting,
included photography, performance, land art, productivity and management. This variety,
plus the very short time of the event, proved to be a real challenge for the artists, but
surprisingly it was also a factor that created cohesion between them.

Acording to Ilie Boca, the coordinator of the Tescani International Painting Camp, one of the
most important painting camps in Romania, to discover a place, an area with its
particularities and secrets, you need time The 7 days duration of the Gernik Art Camp,
compared to that of 20 days from Tescani is very short. This fact, plus a free theme, created
two different attitudes among artists. One of them, more risk-free, was to continue a
personal and familiar theme, as did Agata Czeremuszkin Chrut - Poland, octogenarian Vasile
Pintea - Romania, or Larisa Telipan - Russia, while the other attitude was to enter a state of
flow or hyperfocus, a total abandonment to the mysteries of the place as did Petra Klepcová -
Slovakia, Marie Šeborová - Czech Republic, Barbora Mališová - Cehia, Igor Isac - Romania,
or Mirela Sorina Barna - Romania.

In the long run of the participants at this event, dominated by painters, Julie Glassberg -
France and Vlado and Rajka Poljak Franjević - Lichtenstein, working in photography,
respectively land and interdisciplinary art, created a premiere

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After four days in which I thought that Julie Glassberg abandoned the idea of attending the
Gernik Art Camp, I challenged her to a performance designed to release a part of the
subconscious feelings about our immersion in the landscape and settings of Gernik. Julie's
attitude says something about artistic integrity. Genuine art, if you want to be honest to
yourself, is made only in states of acute emotional and ideatic necessity. So, we painted
blindfolded with Czech headkerchiefs, our hands tied with the American flag, all symbols of
our present and past experience, and we felt liberated, connected and happy.

Julie, a photographer who works for The New York Times, Le Monde, ESPN Mag, or Stern
View, is a woman of the planet who is equally acclaimed in New York, Paris, Tokyo,
Shanghai or Moscow. In a frame that reminds Fritz Perls' gestalt therapy to create the self-
consciousness of a now and here, Julie found at Gernik a tree and an old empty chair as an
expression of her connectivity with the nature and the collective memory of the place. The

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empty chair in her photo is a vehicle meant to engage a dialogue with the memory of Gernik
and the imaginary people that have stood on it over time.

In 1970, American artist Robert Smithson created on the Great Salt Lake in Utah a land art
work entitled Spiral Jetty . The piece became canonized by the art critique as an icon of land
art. Vlado and Rajka Poljak Franjević, two Lichtenstein artists arrived at Gernik in a car
decaled in a foil that wrote SPIRAL-CHANNELS. In 2004, Vlado started the SPIRAL-
CHANNELS project in Estonia and since then he strolled all over the world promoting an
intercultural dialogue where the spiral plays the role of binder or chain link between the
participants.

SPIRAL-CHANNELS is an invitation to self-knowledge through collective interaction. Robert

Smithson’s spiral is a symbol of life and death, of birth and rebirth from the primordial
waters, while Vlado's ritual, by aligning the participants around a spiral marked with
colored stakes, holding samples of earth gathered from his pilgrimages or presentation
copies of art sent by his collaborators, is a process that explores the way in which collective
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thinking is generated. From his artistic philosophy of the spiral as we have seen also in Julie
Glassberg’s snapshot with the imaginary interlocutor on an empty chair, emerges the idea of
communication, transcendental dialogue and participatory thinking. Vlado Franjević, does it
like a shaman or mediator who seems to enact a chapter from On Dialog, David Bohm's
wonderful book about communication.

In “Rajka Poljak, Self-Realisation Through Painting”, a book about Rajka Poljak, Vlado’s
wife and partner, art historian Thomas E. Wanger captures the essence of her endeavour,
noting that, to be recognized in her works, " Rajka Poljak not only brings herself into the
work of art as a shadow, but also addresses her bodily feelings and feeling ". For many,
Vlado’s and Rajka’s forms of expression may seem contrasting and different. He is highly
attracted by the brilliant colours and rhythmic movements of energies, as was observed in
the Orphism movement of Frantisek Kupka or Sonia Delaunay, while Rajka Poljak is
attracted by the dark, mysterious and apparent stillness of our celestial sphere. What binds
this extraordinary artist couple is their search for spiritual in art. Rajka Poljak recognize
herself out of the galactic maze as a shadow which travels and returns home in a timeless
universe. Her self-transformation is done through a self-exploratory journey , outside, in the
middle of the natural settings from Gernik, that gives her the power to control and expand
her awareness.

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Originally from the Republic of Moldova, Larisa Telipan, a Russian citizen today, is a painter
and graphic artist who studied at the prestigious Academy of Art, IE Repin from St.
Petersburg. Founded in 1757, the academy has continuously promoted traditional and
classical Russian art. I knew these details before of her trip to Gernik, and I must confess
that her presence was seen as a great opportunity to watch alive the creation process of an
artist trained in the workshop of Vladimir Alexandrovici Vetrogonsky, the dean of the
academy during her student years. Her paintings have been made from memory and
represent a landscape of hills with two adjacent trees, as well as an urban landscape of St.
Petersburg. The urban landscape depicts a view of the Admiralty Building, a building built
under the leadership of Peter the Great and the St. Isaac's Cathedral seen from the frozen
banks of the Neva River. Her works are based on the subliminal perception of memories and
mental images that come from her childhood in Coscalia, her native village from the
Republic of Moldova, or those from St. Petersburg, where during the cold winters the
glaciers of the Neva River were so thick that by 1900 were crossed with electric trams. Larisa
Telipan combines in her art a skill learned in her academic education, which requires a
careful, methodical technique and rigorous succession of stages in the optical mixing of
colors and handling of shadow and light, with a gestural freedom in details and textures.
One of her most important concerns is composition. The compositional act in her paintings is
a fusion that gives unity and harmony to the whole, structuring by juxtaposition an
intentional mental framework with a visual experience born from the careful observation of
nature.

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Agata Czeremuszkin-Chrut, is a Polish painter with doctoral studies at the Academy of Arts
in Lodz. Her paintings at Gernik are abstract artworks in which the line, surface and
transparency represent a hidden, invisible reality, forming an amalgam born of an internal
necessity that was compared by Kandinsky with the movement of the human soul. In her
combinatorial games, the line and surface plays consecutive roles of support or base of an
image in image. The linear structures in the foreground allow access to in-depth
backgrounds through transparency, alternately fulfilling the function of container and
content. The boundaries are made by open contours, the line that departs from the
foreground, can travel surprisingly backward, offering through direction and movement a
doctrine of the creative way of thinking, and more importantly, of the emotions the artist
goes through. Reading the abstract forms offered by Agata Czeremuszkin-Chrut is a self-
sufficient process. The extrapolations born of associations give us the palette of a human
expression in which something serious and solemn dominates. The process is semiautomatic.
Subconscious projections are adjusted according to the laws of color, composition, and
harmony, alternately repeating a mysterious pattern until it becomes so personal that it
individualizes the artist. A game controlled by Agata Czeremuszkin-Chrut with the authority
of a master.

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As a tribute to Anka, The Gernik Doll is a painting done by the Romanian-American artist,
Adrian Ionita. Anka, a cook and guardian angel for the artists who participated during the
years at the Gernik Art Camp, has a priceless collection of dolls in national Czech costumes. A
symbol and reminder of the past, memory and love.

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