Ciprian Muresan,
he was always interested in edgy subjects,
you know
So he said to me,
"I have this
I'm bothered by this thought, you know"
"There is no good painting representing Ceausescu"
"The party commissioned always,
paintings with him,
you know, but nobody did a good painting"
So he said,
"Is that possible,
to have a good painting of Ceausescu?"
Because we are so used, in Romania,
to associate, to see the
a painting with him
and to immediately
admit that
it's automatic, a bad painting,
you know
So he wanted to
to put the audience into this edgy point,
when you are suddenly shaken
Ceausescu was in power for twenty-five years
So the the Communist Party,
to please him,
they always commissioned hundreds,
thousands of artists to paint every year,
portraits of him and his wife
And select one or two
and present this to him, you know
But he hates them
This was the funny thing
He was never really into his portraits
So they all store into the
contemporary art museum in Bucharest,
they have a huge storage and they have
thousands of thousands of this kind of portrait
So you go there and you see,
basically, thousands of thousands of bad works
So you have either the artist
really wanted to make him ugly,
or you have extremely bourgeois portraits of him,
made with golden frame and flowers
and roses and stuff
So none of these portraits are
a simply good portrait of a man, you know?
So Ciprian Muresan said to me
me, a painter,
in 2008, in Romania,
with a career, international,
"How is if I give you this, this subject now?"
"How would you do it now?"
"After you've been around"
"You know about painting"
"You are interested in painting"
"So do a portrait of him"
And we want the result
to be also valid today, somehow
Like like if you show it
to a contemporary art gallery,
to be a contemporary painting, you know"
The Ceausescu I paint for Cipri,
that was an official pose
But I have to tell you that
when a military court judge him,
in the twenty-fifth of December,
execute him, you know,
they filmed this trial
and they broadcast this film during the revolution
So so everybody was shocked
at that time, for several reasons
Because, first of all, we saw the guy killed
And it's it's always a shock to see
the one who, till yesterday, was the
most beloved son of the people
Secondly, everybody, I guess,
had a strange revelation;
he was suddenly a human being
His appearances were always
He looked good, you know
Especially these portraits
we saw in every classroom
He looked, from the seventies, pretty
Red cheeks and very healthy and
and very young, somehow, you know
And suddenly you
you see the guy, sick,
ugly,
really old It can be your grandmother,
it can be your grandfather, you know
I felt almost sorry for him I was like
So this is the part I wa wanted to explore
He's desperate, he's
he's like an animal
He feels that he is going to die in a few hours
He feels betrayed
So this image is is very powerful
and will always be,
for the generation
who who lived a bit under his regime
And I used, for all my portraits
with Ceausescu after that,
except one or two,
the images from the trial,
because they are so rich
Suddenly you you saw
a guy who looks like your grandfather,
and then you saw him dead,
with a bullet in his head
Christmas Day, '89
Dead on TV
And you you have his face destroyed by bullets
and blood running out of his head
And it's everywhere on TV
So I mean, from Stalin to Hitler, to
they all, you don't have-
They all die or disappear or whatever,
but you in the public memory,
in the public imaginarium,
you don't have this image of them punished