Mihuț Boșcu Kafchin belongs to the post-communist avant-garde from the Paintbrush Factory, the art center in Cluj. He works in various media and disciplines, content-wise established somewhere between antiquity, Pop, Surrealism, the Internet, and the unending vastness of galaxies. He obtains the raw material for his sculptures and objects from the giant pool of the everyday world. This is evident in the three works in the evn collection – wood, cables, polystyrene, sheeting, tape. Despite this very down-to-earth approach – also with the use of technology – the materials have become small treasures with fantastic titles. For example, I am wizard, the piece on the wall, that through simple lighting with optical sheeting reveals the whirr of a magic wand, or the charming Orbiting around light, where colorful lightbulbs, nestled in polystyrene, shine at us like faraway, unnatural objects. Science fiction, magic, astronomy, and a self-constructed extraterrestrial world are recurring themes. Mihuț Boșcu Kafchin builds a psychedelic cosmos with complex relationships. These light pieces allude to the artistʼs methods on how he creates connections within groups of works. Both appear as props in the video Personal Hawking (2011), in which the artist plays a demiurge in an explosion of form and color. The fall of communism is broached here, as well as that of ancient Greece and India.

The simple polystyrene tablet from Method for fighting down, a vague intimation to a painting, shows, on the other hand, another of the artistʼs facets. With drawing and painting he also, at times, makes reference to old masters of past eras. Mihuț Boșcu Kafchin says, for example, in an interview with Nicola Trezzi (The Room, Nr. 17/2013) that he thinks about the medieval icon-painter Andrej Rubljow while painting robots. His work is one of the wildest and most diverse conglomerates of ideas and (technical) solutions to be found between Cluj and Pluto, to say nothing of other solar systems and energies.

Heike Maier-Rieper, 2015 (translation: Virginia Dellenbaugh)