The show hosted by Bazis, Dan Maciuca’s Nothing to Hide, brings forth another painter who also on this occasion decided to step away from his familiar medium and tackle his old interests in the form of collages, sculptures, and also video.
Dan Maciuca is well known for his wild, spontaneous canvases, on which thickly applied paint still gives proof of a well-thought chromatic arrangement and composition. The surfaces of his works are rough and textured, and already close to reliefs; his interest in all things having to do with matter: its structure, texture, and ultimately volume, inevitably brought him to outgrow the bi-dimensional plane of traditional painting. In the works shown at Bazis, the artist decided to go even further into translating his paintings to 3D objects, and the result is nothing short of spectacular.

In taking up his older themes and quests and rephrasing them in different media he (literally) adds a new dimension to them, thus they don’t seem to be dull or passé, instead they become more interesting and complex, posing new problems. This just goes to show that digging ever deeper into the same old questions isn’t necessarily something bad, as long as you manage to find surprising and intriguing new answers, this being precisely what is happening here!

The objects used in the collages / sculptures are mainly found and repurposed items such as (plastic) bottles, industrial scraps, pieces of glass and wood, different materials with as many different textures as possible. This offers a new life, meaning, and function to these objects after they have been cast off as useless. The jagged edges offer a raw finish and the colors, although quite similar to the artist’s usual pallet are no longer obtained through physical combination of pigments, but rather found such as they are and then juxtaposed. Another element is the use of commercial magazines, which are found in over abundance all around us and to which we don’t exactly pay attention; here they have taken on other shapes, they’ve become strange landscapes: peaks, valleys, and caves that capture the eye despite their apparent mess.