The starting point for all of Flaviu Cacoveanu’s work is language. Surveying phrases found in the street, in advertising, from political slogans or lyrics, he selects striking or comical expressions, dissecting and stretching their character in different visual registers. Working in the varied formats of photography, moving-image, neon, and drawing, he creates site interventions with playful touches. During an exhibition at Parliament gallery in Paris, for example, the gallery floor became awash with lemons and limes, nestled between sculptures, projections and neons. These fruit surface in the moving image works, so there’s this back and forth, this extracting and ricocheting between different components of his practice. Echoing the work of the Dadaists and the Conceptual movement, Cacoveanu’s work sits firmly within the remit of the everyday, whilst his chosen mediums of neon, photography and moving image navigate these conceptual currents in the digital era. Riffing off of techniques such as the readymade developed by Marcel Duchamp and the inventive curatorial flare of Harald Szeemann, Cacoveanu puckishly flips the expected behaviour of his chosen digital mediums— projecting onto ceilings, laying monitors on the floor or placing miniature neons in the corners of space. This mix of absurd subversions and astute observations generates intriguing and unsettling environments for audiences, as the surreal traits of the everyday are delivered in concentrated format by Cacoveanu.

Parliament

Berlin