Adrian Ghenie: Roman Campagna Exhibition review

By Laurent Boudier

The return of the prodigy (and prodigious) to the Ropac Gallery. Born in 1977 in Romania, the artist Adrian Ghenie has become a superstar in just a few years. Lightning-fast, his rise owes much to his almost punk-like or pirate-like way of bringing into his canvases, through collision and fragmentation, elements and images that are, at first glance, strongly contradictory. Characters with cartoonish heads and bodies or everyday objects of our modern world (computers, trainers...) appear in landscapes of Roman ruins and rub shoulders, everywhere, with references to painters of the past (Nicolas Poussin, Giorgio De Chirico or Francis Bacon). In a few canvases in XXL format and stunning charcoal-lined drawings, he recycles, in a veritable maelstrom, the histories of art.

(Translated from French)