Dan Perjovschi
IMMIGRATION
Drawing on paper
2005

Dan Perjovschi’s drawing is simple as a child’s. But his message is still as incisive, his favourite targets being the world’s great questions, glob- al warming, the enlargement of the European Union toward poor Romania, Islam, the rich and the poor… The simplicity of the drawing contrasts with the work’s evoc- ative powerfulness, directly inspired by cultural and politi- cal current affairs. Three lines, two words, and everything has been said. Through the circulation of signs, Dan Perjovschi takes us to a world traversed with humour but also darkness, of tentimes tender, sometimes insolent. With a concise a quick gesture, he elaborates a sim- ple political strategy that nev- er forgets to be poetic. In an interview with Charline Corubolo for the “Petit Bul- letin” newspaper, Dan Per- jovschi said: “We are all living in a post-Charlie Hebdo world. Freedom of speech is fundamental in our contemporary society and in contemporary art, but I believe this freedom has to go hand in hand with re- sponsibility. We are now under pressure to claim our rights, to be better protected and speak freely… It’s a very important time. I reflect upon these is- sues in my drawings. We must reply to violence with intelligence and humour. We must laugh about death.”

About the artist

Born in 1961 in Sibiu. He lives and works in Bucharest. Internationally acclaimed artist and political activist Dan Perjovschi covers surfaces worldwide—walls, windows, ceilings, doors, floors— with his trenchant, terse cartoons, criticizing current geo-political, social, and cultural crises and customs almost as fast as they form. He began developing his practice on the walls of his own apartment in the early 1980s, when the regime of Nicolae Ceausescu forced him to keep his subversive wit under cover. With the 1989 Romanian revolution, in which he participated, he was unleashed. For Perjovschi, everything is fair game, from the Occupy Wall Street Movement to the hierarchies of the art world to the apparent decline in the quality of Finnish men’s sperm. In his words: “Europe is one of my subjects. Everything else is the other. I look, understand, and visually translate local and global issues. […] I am more time-specific than site-specific.”

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Courtesy: The artist