Jecza Gallery at UNTITLED ART Miami: Into Light and Shadow: Black & White Dialogues in Contemporary Romanian Art - Marius Bercea & Iosif Kiraly
Marius Bercea’s recent black and white oil drawings on paper emerge from a deeply personal interplay between photographic memory and painterly tradition. Rooted in his own archive of personal photographs, these works evoke a unique dialogue between the immediacy of the captured image and the contemplative act of painting. The monochrome palette, dominated by the densest black and the starkest whites, strips visual narrative to its essence — a deliberate reduction that foregrounds form, light, and shadow as primary conveyors of meaning.
Bercea’s practice is inseparable from the artistic education of a generation of Romanian painters born in the 1970s, who learned art history predominantly through black-and-white illustrated albums of international masters. This formative experience fostered a sensibility attuned to nuances of tonal gradation and compositional rigour, reflecting a pedagogical curriculum shaped by monochrome visual culture. The artist’s work can be read as a contemporary continuation of this lineage, wherein black and white serve as both medium and metaphor, bridging historical memory and present condition.
His works also resonate deeply with the ethereal atmosphere found in Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, itself a musical interpretation of Mallarmé’s evocative poetry. Just as Mallarmé’s writing captures the subtle interplay of silence and suggestion, and Debussy’s composition translates this into a shimmering soundscape of light and shadow, Bercea’s monochrome pieces navigate a similar terrain of delicate tonal contrasts. Through intimate textures and nuanced shades, his paintings invite a meditative experience that echoes the sensual lyricism of Mallarmé and the dreamlike fluidity of Debussy, crafting a visual language that is both tactile and profoundly human.
Significantly, Marius Bercea’s black and white works resonate in profound dialogue with the black and white self-portraits of Iosif Kiraly, produced in the 1980s during the final years of Romania’s communist regime. Kiraly’s monochrome self-portraits are marked by an intense introspection and formal austerity, confronting themes of identity, isolation, and the weight of historical circumstance through the stark opposition of light and shadow. Executed within a socio-political context rich with repression and cultural constraint, these portraits embody a resistance through subtlety—where the absence of color magnifies the psychological and existential depth of the human figure, captured with raw honesty and vulnerability.
The recent acquisition by the Museum of Modern Art in New York of three of Kiraly’s seminal black and white self-portraits affirms their significance not only within Romanian art history but also on a global scale, situating his work as a critical touchstone of late 20th-century Eastern European modernism. Bercea’s contemporary monochrome works can be seen as a continuation and expansion of this visual and conceptual legacy. While Kiraly’s portraits evoke a world shadowed by oppression and searching for individual presence, Bercea’s renderings—infused with personal photographs and allusions to “Balkanic Impressionism”—reflect the complexities of post-communist transition, layered memory, and shifting geopolitical realities in the Black Sea region.
Through his minimalist use of ivory black on white paper, Bercea reverberates with Kiraly’s original concerns but also transforms them, using light captured through the darkest pigment to explore nostalgia, historical trauma, and renewal. This dialogue between the two artists reveals a shared language of monochrome that transcends generations and political eras, creating a rich, poetic continuum that challenges viewers to reconsider visibility and invisibility, presence and absence, in the charged space where personal memory intersects with collective history.
