Last winter, the curator Alex Radu brought in a series of paintings by Mircea Suciu into an exhibition which paid homage and reinterpreted the work of Chantal Akerman – Chantal by Us (/SAC @ Bucharest). The pieces fit perfectly into the show – visually and conceptually – even though some of the paintings were made (some as far back as eight) years beforehand. Their inclusion only added to the themes explored: transgenerational trauma, gender and identity struggles, loss, and that deep-rooted fear of abandonment.
Suciu’s creative approach is based on his archive of images from art history and socio-political history. One of the activities he most frequently engaged in, while growing up, was that of studying and building a personal collection/archive of art history images alongside his father. These images later became tools for the artist in adulthood, through which he provides metaphorical responses to significant geo-political and cultural events.
Out of all the works in the exhibition – both Suciu’s paintings and the rest of the installations – I kept finding myself drawn back, almost magnetically, to one piece in particular: Humanity (homage to Meredith Frampton) (2018). Time and time again, I’d somehow end up standing in front of it. It’s a painting nearly two meters tall, made with oil, acrylic, and monotype on canvas, divided into three distinct sections: two upper panels and one lower. Each part tells a story – about how history has always been written by the victors, and how images have long held the power to shape public perception.
The image on the left side of the upper section is a replica of a 16th-century engraving by Theodor de Bry. It was based on accounts from the German explorer Hans Staden, who in 1557 described what he claimed to have witnessed in South America. But his story was filtered through the lens of a European colonizer, framing the landscape and its people as chaotic, barbaric, and cannibalistic. De Bry took this story and translated it visually, reinforcing a distorted, dehumanizing perspective. This representation became the dominant image of South American societies at the time – circulating widely through prints and reinforcing the idea of their inferiority compared to European civilization. What reached the public were the sensationalized images of brutality. De Bry chose to depict them as savage and merciless, and these images spread quickly, shaping a colonial worldview that echoed through centuries of history.
The second frame in the upper register features a photograph from the archives of the Black Holocaust Museum. It captures the 1930 lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Marion, Indiana – one of the most infamous acts of racial violence in American history. Alongside a third young man, James Cameron, they were accused – without solid evidence – of murdering a white man, Claude Deeter, and assaulting his companion. A mob stormed the jail, beat the young men, and lynched Shipp and Smith in a public square, in front of thousands of onlookers. Cameron narrowly escaped death, pulled from the noose at the last moment. The photograph taken at the scene – showing the lifeless bodies hanging while the crowd watches, unmoved – has since become a stark symbol of racial brutality. No one was ever held accountable for the murders, underscoring the deep failures of the justice system and the systemic racial violence of that era.
The lower section of the painting features a reproduction of a work by British artist Meredith Frampton, who was born into a prestigious family of artists. His 1928 painting, Marguerite Kelsey, portrays the young woman of the same name – a figure of bourgeois society and one of his muses. Depicted in an elegant, composed pose, her serene presence seems to quietly triumph over the tension and chaos of the upper register constructed by Suciu. What is particularly interesting here is the artist’s use of artifice – a gradation of inner blues, a gradual placement of the turbulent emotions generated by the passage through history.
I believe I now understand why I kept returning to this piece. It wasn’t just because it brings together an unjust past and raises questions about the perception of an image through the contemporary viewer’s lens. No. What haunted me was Marguerite’s detachment from the horrors behind her. Was she blatantly unaware? Or did she dare not turn back?
Do we also dare not?