History and dreams meet in a painting

Drinking tea with Bogdan Luca

Last time I visited the 401 Richmond, the March exhibition at the Red Head Gallery stood out: the boldly coloured, dream-like, abstract-realist canvases on which I could barely make out the faces of elderly people that looked familiar, the people I’ve seen many times in my youth in weddings and funerals and summer day trips to the coast and regular neighbourly coffee visits. People that, well, looked southern and east European. (This scene in Marco Belocchio’s Buongiorno notte illustrates them/us well.)

I wasn’t far off. Bogdan Luca grew up in Romania, before his mother emigrated with him to Canada in the 1990s when he was still a teen, and the series of paintings, grouped into The Green Suitcase project, was inspired by the old family photos. One figure in particular looms - his maternal grandfather, an army general and high counterintelligence official in the Romanian regime. 

While artists are not usually fans of the kind of questions that require them to explain how they do something, Bogdan humoured me when I visited him in his studio in a warehouse on Geary Avenue to ask him about his work. He tells me he starts all his paintings with an idea, but then the piece takes over. The job is to find out what the particular painting wants to be, and to help it get there. (This is how George Saunders talks about writing short stories, by the way. It’s chiselling the story out to what it wants to be. Getting out of its way.)

This particular series, I tell him, looks fairly cinematic. What would be his cinematic influences, or preferences? “I like directors who are also painters in their cinematography,” he says. David Lynch and Peter Greenaway. Lars von Trier. There’s a time dimension to his paintings, Bogdan tells me: you spend time with them and new things emerge the longer you stay. I have absolutely noticed that. They sort of unfold before your mind, in the course of a certain amount of time. Figures come out of shadows. Body parts. Objects. New connections between objects are established.

When I ask him where home is, and if he feels culturally split between former and current country, there’s no doubt in his mind that home is here. But he also feels different – ”I did come from another planet, a communist country” – and the older he gets, the more accepting he is of that difference. We come to the conclusion that when we are younger, we want to blend in more. But later, past middle age and older, we become more ourselves. 

The Green Suitcase has recently closed, but Bogdan will soon be announcing a collective exhibit scheduled for April. Find him on Instagram.