Hibridizări, combinări, interferențe artistice. Două experimente românești în intervalul pandemic
Hybridizations, Combinations, Artistic Interferences. Two Romanian Experiments in the Pandemic Interval

Summary/Abstract: In an era when the former supremacy of a form of language has been replaced, programmatically, by the return to conjugative principles of avant-garde origin and declared transdisciplinary vector, the hybridization of types of artistic expression no longer belongs to the regime of urgency, but to that of normality. It does more than reflect, at a deep level, a whole series of substantial changes at the meta-artistic level or illustrate the needs of a market (artistic, literary, cultural in the broadest sense of the term) shaped by new – economic, social and mentality – realities. Whether we see it as the natural result of progressive sublimations and clarifications or as the discrete consequence of entropic densifications and disturbances, we must recognize that the hybridization process was already manifesting in multiple ways a few years ago. But many artists felt it as a circumstantial necessity after the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic (which produced, as we well know, decisive transformations of the artistic field). It proved to be an effective solution for bringing together identities and artistic formulas otherwise condemned to malignant isolation, not only psychologically or socially, but also creatively speaking. Regardless of their age, all artists have extensively used – although filtering it in various degrees – the forms of social and visual media they found available in the context of isolation or lockdown, in order to promote their products and protect the illusion of belonging to a wider or smaller community.Although, inevitably, most actors on the literary and artistic scene have looked for alternative solutions for aesthetic survival or have shifted their main centres of interest to the online sphere, the products resulting from rather traditional collaborations between writers and artists have not ceased to be designed and even realized.I find it significant that numerous products of this type do not feed on the usual pandemic imaginary (v. Ilie 2022), nor graft on the consciousness of imminent death, but prefer to configure alternative worlds of almost unreal beauty or to re-activate canonical artistic themes. Starting from these premises, my study will analyze two of the most interesting books resulting from the fruitful complicity between Romanian writers and visual artists that could be possible between 2020-2022: Dalí's mustache and other colors, the spectacular pictonovel by Felix Aftene and Lucian Dan Teodorovici (2020), respectively Subversive (sarcasms and paradoxes), by Mircea Oprea, with drawings by Liviu Şoptelea (2022). In the parenthetical, very difficult interval of the pandemic, such substantial artistic projects proved capable of (re)dimensioning the cultural and even proposing it as one of the surest remedies against total isolation and radical loneliness.

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