A Conversation with Eva Chapkin
Dislocation
Painting After Certainty
On the Paintings of Gili Mocanu
I can’t quite resist the temptation, when writing about Gili Mocanu, to begin by saying what his work is not—perhaps because I am simply unable to pin down what it is right off the bat. It is not narrative in any straightforward sense. I would not call it abstract in any pure or doctrinaire way, though abstraction is clearly one of its primary operating conditions. It is not symbolic in the decodable manner that symbolism or iconography usually promises, where one sign unlocks another, and everyone goes home pleased with themselves. Nor does it sit comfortably inside the familiar binaries that still structure too much writing on contemporary painting: figuration versus nonfiguration, image versus text, expression versus system. The point, of course, is that Mocanu’s work has spent the better part of two decades making those categories look increasingly flimsy—and any writing attempting to pin it down is likely to wobble a little too. Yet here goes.
Born in Constanţa in 1971 and based in Bucharest, Mocanu belongs to the generation of Romanian artists who emerged after 2000 and decisively complicated the field of painting in the region. He was part of deInterese, one of the key artistic formations of its moment and an antecedent to the gallery Posibila. Yet his position has always remained somewhat singular, refusing to become a representative case study of that generation. I would argue that his artistic quest is too internally driven to become that; too formally erratic in the best sense, too elusive, too resistant to becoming exemplary of anything beyond its own peculiar logic. Add to that his parallel activities as a poet and as an electronic musician, and the contours of the practice become clearer: Mocanu’s painting is fed by compression, rhythm, fragmentation, vibration, recurrence, and a coded intensity that exceeds the pictorial field.
My first encounter with his work came during Don’t Cry Anymore, Gili at Arsmonitor in 2024, and what struck me immediately was the unusual coexistence of technical rigor and a kind of visual volatility I still struggle to describe without sounding evasive, so I guess I am already arriving at my first wobble in this text. Mocanu can move from reduced representational motifs—a hand holding a knife in DVN(2021), for instance—to works in which writing and painting enter into something closer to mutual sabotage, as in Consonant and Vowel (2006). He is equally persuasive when the painting moves into more unstable territory—between flatness and depth, between abstraction and the lingering ghost of representation that haunts his work, between the geometric and the cosmological.
In that same exhibition, this tension culminates in works such as Revera 1 (2020–24), which reaches a particularly satisfying intensity, reminding me, for instance, of the enigmatic bodily shapes of Loie Hollowell’s abstractions. Hard edges and curving lines separate planes of color that are then softened by gradients and tonal transitions, creating a depth that seems to emerge against the supposed logic of flatness. Elsewhere, in the Untitled pink works from roughly the same period, or in the Portrait-Landscape hybrids, he alternates those clean chromatic divisions with passages of thicker, rougher texture. The result is not stylistic inconsistency but a deliberate pressure on surface: what can a painting hold before it starts speaking in several registers at once? Quite a lot, apparently.
The curatorial text for Don’t Cry Anymore, Gili describes the image in Mocanu’s work as a witness to “sub-natural and supernatural immersions,” a phrase that sounds perilous on paper and surprisingly exact in front of the paintings. Encrypted text, cosmological allusions, existential weight: all are present. Fortunately, they do not present themselves as esoteric decoration or pseudo-spiritual mood-setting. One could argue that these recurring themes are directly tied to the large philosophical questions for which painting remains oddly well equipped: human existence, being, truth, origin, and the cosmic universe. Archaic questions, certainly, but here they do not sit passively in the work like noble content. If anything, they seem to be at odds with the paintings. One senses that the image is being asked to carry something too large for it, and that strain becomes part of its force.
That strain became especially clear to me in As If, his most recent solo exhibition with Arsmonitor. There, the works carried compositional and visual echoes of Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Nets; the recurring patterns, the interchangeable motifs, the sense of forms hovering, always in movement, always being bent, morphed, trembling, and utterly infinite—all of this pushes the paintings toward those larger existential and cosmological questions running through so much of Mocanu’s practice. The curved lines and recurring ovals and circles allude to those grand topics, almost as if they were celestial bodies, often filtered through mythology rather than cosmology. Titles such as Jupiter and Saturn make that especially clear. In a way, they are old projections, old gods, old frameworks through which humans once tried to make the universe legible. Mocanu knows that painting can no longer inherit those frameworks intact in today’s world, but he also knows it cannot quite leave them alone.
In the mirror series, that logic becomes even more concentrated. There, the centered oval composition emerges from what the curatorial text described as a visible reconciliation of opposites—masculine and feminine, symbolized through the oval, the rhombus, the triangle, and the square—but also between the image and the viewer, hence the mirror itself. First the artist looked into the mirror, and now we do, supported by the furrowed cracks and sinusoidal cuts structuring the backdrop. As Silviu Pădurariu rightly pointed out, painting here is no longer a window in the Albertian tradition, but a mirror. And if it is a mirror, then all those hard-edged curves and soft gradients are the convexities and concavities of that mirror—warped contours recurring throughout Mocanu’s practice that now seem to matter even more.
I cannot help but think of Jan van Eyck’s mirror in the Arnolfini Portrait, where artist, viewer, and space are folded into a single reflective device, bending under the weight of optical compression. But also—perhaps more accurately—of Anish Kapoor’s mirrors, and of the omphalos-like chamber of Cloud Gate in Chicago in particular, where the morphed surface reflects in all directions at once, swallowing perspective and returning the world to us as something unstable and endless. There is a real fear in that infinity, one that consumes rather than consoles, and I suspect that is precisely why I find myself so consumed by these paintings. Mocanu’s mirrors do not return the world in any stable or reassuring way. They warp it, stretch it, and send it back in all directions at once.
This may be why his work remains so resistant to useful classification. Mocanu is too invested in painting’s metaphysical capacities to be reduced to formalism, and too materially exacting to be absorbed into mysticism. But what finally matters is not that the work escapes categories; many artists manage that much, often by being merely vague. Mocanu’s paintings resist classification because they go beyond certainty, exploring the elusive and unstable through surface and depth, sign and sensation, cosmos and interiority, control and vibration. Text appears, but refuses to function securely as text. Geometry organizes the image, but only to bend it toward something cosmological, mythological, or psychic. The mirror reflects, but only by warping what it returns. Representational elements emerge, but never fully separate themselves from the grounds that threaten to swallow them. Nothing in these paintings stays where it is supposed to stay, which is probably why the work is so hard to pin down without a wobble: it has already rearranged the terms by the time you try.
Last Updated on May 13, 2026
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About the author:
Julien Delagrange (b. 1994, BE) is an art historian, contemporary artist, and the director of CAI and CAI Gallery. Previously, Delagrange has worked for the Centre for Fine Arts (BOZAR) in Brussels, the Jan Vercruysse Foundation, and the Ghent University Library. His artistic practice and written art criticism are strongly intertwined, examining contemporary art in search of new perspectives in the art world.
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