From May 24th to June 15th, 2019, Estopia Art Gallery presents the exhibition Lighting Grey by Sergiu Laslo.

Trained at the neo-figurative art school in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, the young artist aims to carry out, in his first solo show, a highly original exercise of introspection in grey: a gallery of bizarre portraits unfolds under the eyes of the viewer, almost all (apparently) in monochrome strokes. The new series of works by Sergiu Laslo opens an ironic-absurd slit towards an anti-metaphysical world, featuring solitary protagonists, most of them captured in unusual and strange postures, with their faces half covered or even completely absent.

At a closer glance, there seems to be a sort of symbiotic relation between the suspended gestures of these characters and the dominant play of grey shades the artist works with. Coming from a background that speaks for itself when it comes to the long experimental use of grey in the new neo-figurative trend, Laslo succeeds intelligently to alternate light nuances and subtle chromatic insinuations. In almost every work one can notice chromatic irisations bursting out from the margins, as if all of a sudden, the viewer would start seeing better, foreseeing life and colour beyond the snapshots in which these characters are portrayed.

In The Worker – which also appears on the poster of the exhibition – the character’s hands, as well as, partially, his face, appear to be blurred, consumed, flaccid, like a blotting paper which absorbed the wear and tear, all in contrast with the rigid aspect, as if “embalmed”, of the uniform and of the squared tool bag. A mannerist – sober execution, which can bring into one’s mind the iconic image of the past “new working class” (not only the one coming from the so-much-visited Communism today, but also the one as portrayed in Leni Riefenstahl’s movies, for instance). Otherwise, the Cluj neo-figurative can be interpreted, in its permanent temptation to scrape, remove, blur or decompose the figure, as a sort of post-communist idiosyncrasy to the “new bourgeoisie”.