Mitte, Berlin
Miklós Onucsán
Pseudo-Drawings
Plan B'Pseudo-' is both 'quasi-' and 'anti-', failure and contestation, insufficiency or surplus. Using the dynamic deviation the word produces as a kind of prefix to both denote and de-nature his graphical output from the 1980s, Miklós Onucsán is perhaps thinking of the theoretically subaltern status of drawing in the hierarchy of artistic modalities, of what is ‘proper’ to the preparatory sketch, of the point at which drawing might become something else, all these thresholds being first materialized or visualized, and then transgressed in the works. Drawing is staged here as paradoxical object like those imagined by Zeno of Elea, placed in a class of logical problems where, for instance, distances cannot be crossed by athletes in pursuit of slower competitors or by arrows flying towards their targets, but rather become incompressible as they break into infinite segments and half-segments, implode into an endless diminishment of ever-smaller separations. An aesthetics of calculation – and perhaps a sensuousness of perplexity – grow from the logical netherworld to which such paradoxes expose the mind. Drawing here is never really achieved and always overcome: pre-figured and then flooded with ‘improper’ material that perturbs its spatial or temporal armature and muddles its boundaries to other mediums. It is saturated with inklings and slippages, with marks of past and future events. The 'pseudo-' is then an under- and over-performance, the excess of a deficit in the application of the various norms that define what constitutes a drawing. —Mihnea Mircan Miklós Onucsán, born in 1952 in Gherla, Romania, lives and works in Oradea, Romania. In 2019, he represented Romania at the 58th International Art Exhibition — La Biennale di Venezia. Selected exhibitions include: Relatări despre o singurătate zgomotoasă, Salonul de proiecte, Bucharest (2024); Graft. Materials and Processes, Galeria Plan B, Berlin (2023); Lost in the Moment That Follows, Ways of Collecting: Ovidiu Șandor Collection, Kunsthalle Praha, Prague (2023); Locus Solus, Arter, Istanbul (2022); Landscape in a Convex Mirror, Art Encounters Biennial, Timisoara (2021); Perspectives, Bozar Centre for Contemporary Art, Brussels (2019); Unfinished Conversations on the Weight of Absence, Romanian Pavilion at the 58th International Art Exhibition — La Biennale di Venezia (2019); "What is normal for the spider, is chaos for the fly.", Galeria Plan B, Berlin (solo, 2018); La Brique, the Brick, Caramida, La Kunsthalle, Mulhouse (2019); Double Heads Matches. A selection of contemporary artworks from four Romanian private collections, New Budapest Gallery, Budapest (2018); Life – a User’s Manual, Art Encounters Biennale, Timisoara (2017); Notes on a Landscape, Bucharest (2017); Track Changes, curated by Plan B at Mendes Wood DM, Sao Paolo (2016); Expanded Space – Festival of Public Art, Bucharest (2016); Mo(nu)ments, MAGMA Contemporary Art Space, Sfântu Gheorghe (solo, 2015); Art has no Alternative, Tranzit, Bratislava (2015); Intense Proximity – La Triennale 2012, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2012).