The metal leader, fallen in disgrace, has taken “revenge” on the craner that has helped to remove the statue: Gigi Gavrilescu has been one the victims of the repression subsequent to the events from November 1987 from Brasov and, after the Revolution from 1989, has killed himself, leaving a farewell letter confessing that his gesture was explained by the fact that he was feeling disappointed by the political Romanian class. Apparently conceived as a pseudo-documentary with humoristic intentions, “The Red Rider”, Anca Benera’s movie, puts life into Lenin’s statue abandoned in the yard of the Mogosoaia Palace revealing how the heavy colossus stretches his old stiffed bones and speaks out his memories, through a flash back.

Esthetically, the work fits in the area of the metalinguistic changes: an art object is “recycled” and repositioned in a new artistic context, with new meanings. The staged story has in the middle many changes: the transition of the Romanian political regimes which also attracts sudden changes of the styles and the art subjects, the change of the historical character shaped using the same metal (Charles the Ist and after that Lenin) and the statue’s location (Piata Revolutiei, Piata Presei Libere and after that the yard of the Mogosoaia Palace).

All these changes are ironically continued by Anca Benera in her video project, one of the sequences catching a statue conceived by the artist and exhibited in 2007 at Galeria Noua from Bucharest, within the exhibition “Back to the Future”. The art object makes a synthesis between a few elements of Charles the Ist statue and Lenin’s: the result obtained by the artist was that of Lenin on the back of a horse, exactly the way that Mestrovici conceived Charles the Ist statue. Character’s position discards him from the classic status as representative of the proletariat, and Lenin on the back of a horse, “The Red Rider”, resembles more with the symbol of the bourgeoisie.

The statue brought to life by Anca Benera in her movie appears to be an allusion to the Communism that has not definitively disappeared from Romania and which from time to time still shows its head, recognizable in the behavior of the political leaders as well as in the collection of prejudices and nostalgias of the ordinary people. But the ludic tone in which the movie ends shows that the artist had no intention to hold a lecture about the morality, warning about a possible return of a totalitarian regime.

The piece of art is symbolically centered, through an elegant, funny and relaxed allegory in the Pop Art style, somehow Andy Warhol style, on the cyclic metamorphosis of the political current. At the end, one remains with the impression that the artist has staged a joke with flavor, joking about the political frenzy of the different social class and laughing of the ones which strongly sustain, from a tour of ivory, the so-called perfect autonomy of the Art.

Lucia Popa

The year-round exhibition plan of FUTURA is supported by:

Ministerstvo kultury ČR, Magistrát hl.m. Prahy

Main media patners:
Radio Wave, Umělec, Flash Art

Media partners:
Radio 1, Artyčok.tv, Atelier, Pragueout, Artmap

Thanks:
Imarmitaliani, Rumunian cultural Institut, Centrul European de Cultura Sinaia