joyrider is a duo show with works by Luca Florian and Matei Dumitriu at Zina Gallery. The walls, each with its own color, and artists’ paintings from different periods and styles, seemingly unrelated, featuring a wide range of subjects, from plasticky trinkets, friends, clouds, a rollercoaster, to a nice thought, a hug or just confusion – got me thinking, as Lauren Berlant puts it:“we have a situation here.”
These days I feel like my goal when it comes to writing about art might be to pick any image in the world and ask what can it consequently mean and do to oneself. Now that I sense that something is shifting within contemporary art in this respect, and I am overburdened with a crowded obsession with uniqueness and one-of a-kind images, I must quiet my curious laughter and start asking questions:

LUCA
Both artists told me that they work with intuitive and affective ways of selecting their subjects. I asked Luca ’’whAt InsPirEs yoU’’ and he responded that he draws inspiration from video games, movies, and ancient imagery, as well as his imagination, dreams and fantasies, only to release his subjects into the present moment, where they either fade into indistinct memories, losing their contour, or transform into familiar exaggerations, gaining their contour back. He told me about the painting Rivers of Blood (2023) – title borrowed from a sword in the Elden Ring video game, a cursed weapon that has felled countless men – that symbolize destructive potential inherent in certain systems, incorporating ancient symbols from pre-Christian tombs to illustrate the danger of compulsive beliefs. The three subjects are prepared for a confrontation, but for now it’s just me, who confront them with my gaze. And I can tell you they seem ready.

MATEI
At the same time, Pepe, in Permanent Green Light Pepe (2023) is pointing a gun at me, whispering from a text-to-image meme format that I am too cringe to live. I asked Matei if there is something he wants the viewers to know about his process. He responded “I’m not sure if there’s something I want them to know, but rather want them to feel”.
The painting Embrouille (2023) portrays Limmy from Limmy’s Show and his disoriented reaction from a youtube skit where he finds out that one kilogram of feathers equals one kilogram of steel.

Matei told me that he is interested in a specific kind of confusion in his works. Being confused and overwhelmed by a surprising truth that is so obvious, an affective complicity, a near wink from your emotions asking for validation. His subjects seem to already know the functional equivalent of doubt. That’s why the trinket is shedding tears, sensing the trivialization of the powerful symbol he once was– the devil – transformed into a toy. And Jeremy Meeks, the hot mugshot guy, is looking confused into the police camera, embodying in anticipation his career in modelling.

LUCA
I asked Luca “why grief?’’, and he told me because it’s a process that inherently involves relational aspects. In Grief (2024), a two-person subject, a symbolic dual representation of the griever, is portraying grief not only as an external loss of a loved one but also as an internal loss of your own representation of that individual. I see that he is exploring togetherness in his recent works, like in Scavengers, Bound to Fail (2024), where two blurry figures, standing in a mobile stance are seemingly unaware that they’re living out those faint moments before failure.

MATEI
I asked Matei ’’why mint green?’’ and he said ’’I like it. It’s artificial. It’s synthetic.’’

LUCA MATEI
joyrider is a symptomatic exhibition over a potential of surplus, decisions and out of focus-ness. A joyride can be an activity chosen purely for the sake of being present, with all the exhaustion that comes with it. The exhibition puts together the concrete interplay between paintings, as well as more intimate connections that might be actually felt or not. The playing-out of those levels represents a dynamic process wherein various parts interact and evolve, ultimately leading to a compatible combination of elements. The paintings are curated to communicate through colour, parts of body, sadness, light, irony and suspended similar intentions. And I get it. A joyride these days can be disorienting and frustrating, with conflicting thoughts and emotions at play.

Text by Daniela Custrin