THE PULCINELLA AT THE TABLE: IN CONVERSATION WITH TUDOR CIURE‌SCU

I like being on the move because it allows me to dream. Wherever I arrive, I eventually try to turn that dream into something tangible.

Moving to Switzerland at twenty-one to study at ECAL probably shaped me the most. It taught me to pay attention to details, structure, and context. I learnt that every decision in a work has consequences, and that precision is a form of respect towards both the work and the viewer.

What I had to unlearn was a mentality I grew up with in Romania, where people often say, "it's good enough" or "that will do." It comes from incredible resourcefulness and decades of having to make things work with very little. I admire that ingenuity, but I realised I no longer wanted to compromise if I could avoid it. I'd rather wait and make something exactly the way I imagine it than settle for an approximation. I'm chasing excellence. Not the kind measured by flawless execution, but by the clarity of the idea.

At the same time, living in Romania shaped the way I see the world. It gave me a dark sense of humour, a certain honesty, and an almost irrational confidence that any obstacle can somehow be transformed into an opportunity. I still carry that with me everywhere I go.

The constant anxiety any artist passes through, and I don't think it is a contemporary problem; they probably had anxiety in the Renaissance too.

The gas tank became a metaphor for that constant pressure. It feels as if something could explode at any moment, but that tension is also what keeps the work alive. If I ever stopped feeling it completely, I think I'd become suspicious of my own practice.

I think childhood gives you a sense of a unique experience of life, and the constant wonder of finding out new things which, as adults, can hit a plateau. As adults, we encounter similar experiences, unless you're actively looking for new ones.

I was sceptical about working with childhood because it can be a cliché, but in these works I looked for a place of raw honesty. It was a period where I was looking for the incipient moments that gave me the butterflies in the stomach I have now when I think of a new work.

I don't approach sacred imagery ironically. My connection to religious iconography came from realising that these symbols were originally created by artists themselves. They are visual languages that can continue to evolve rather than untouchable images.

With HERUVIM, I wanted to use the Baroque cherub because it carries centuries of associations with innocence. By placing a gun in each hand, one aimed outward and one at its own head, I was interested in a fundamental paradox of the human condition: that humanity is simultaneously destructive towards others and itself. The two guns point in opposite directions, but they ultimately describe the same cycle of violence.

For me, the cherub becomes less a religious figure than a mirror of humanity itself, occupying that uncomfortable space where innocence and violence exist simultaneously.

Since childhood I've had a complicated relationship with authority. And I like to poke at it, sometimes literally.

The reference is from the 1971 film W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism by avant-garde Serbian filmmaker Dušan Makavejev. I found it very interesting that from the '70s, the image of Sigmund Freud, a recurring figure in my practice created this sort of ambivalence, of love and hate.

I wouldn't say I grew up on the internet. I still had a very pre-internet childhood. I spent much more time on the streets than online. I became fascinated with the internet when I was around ten or eleven, writing on blogs and connecting with people from around the world.

For me, the internet wasn't an escape from reality. It was a point of comparison. It felt like looking over a wall as a kid to see what was on the other side. I knew there was something beyond the reality I was living in, and I wanted to be connected to it.

That curiosity has always been there. The internet simply amplified it. I never felt the need to choose between Caravaggio and Sonic the Hedgehog, or Freud and WallStreetBets. They're all products of human culture, and I'm interested in the unexpected conversations that can happen between them.

So I don't think the breadth of my references is a deliberate position against the canon or in favour of the internet. It's just a reflection of how I naturally consume information. I'm endlessly curious, and I tend to move horizontally across disciplines rather than staying within one field. That's where I often find the most interesting connections.

I've studied Albrecht Dürer since high school, and he has remained a recurring figure in my practice. His Young Hare is one of those images that never left me. It represents an extraordinary sensitivity towards life, and I wanted to revisit that image from a contemporary perspective.

I often work through opposites and ambivalence. In L'Eterna Urgenza, I imagined these almost angelic rabbits as symbols of fertility, innocence, and continuous reproduction. But if I wanted the work to genuinely address life and death, I felt that using representations wasn't enough. I wanted the discussion to become materially real, so I chose taxidermy.

The process itself became part of the work. It took almost two years because I didn't want any rabbit to be killed for the piece. Together with the taxidermist, we waited for farmers to contact us whenever a rabbit died of natural causes. That waiting introduced an ethical dimension into the work that I consider just as important as the final object.

I think we are no longer just viewers of the spectacle but active participants in it, like an MMORPG game. And post-2016, this game is a highly saturated, monochrome game.

I totally feel it. It's a decision I've consciously made, having realised I might bleed in the short term due to my ADHD practice, which is very market-counterintuitive. I like to think long-term and to think of my practice as world-building. I'm confident it will be better than capitalising on some type of work from an early stage of my career. Blame finding out about Mike Kelley very early, haha.

But yes, I know it would've been a much easier path to capitalise on the first thing that brought me validation, but being a skateboarder in formation, I like to keep a fisheye vision and trust the bigger picture of my practice, and that everything I do is connected by an invisible wire.

I think any artist who has been at a dinner where they're the only artist in the room knows that feeling. You almost become the entertainer, the Pulcinella of the table. People expect you to perform a certain role, to be the eccentric one, the one with unusual answers. That tension has always fascinated me.

So yes, the work can be seen that way, the constant equilibrium the artist has to maintain.

More broadly, my works often function like screenshots from a film. You're only shown a single frame, while the frame before and the frame after exist in the viewer's imagination. PULCINELLA is one of those suspended moments. You don't know whether the chair is about to fall or recover its balance, and that uncertainty is exactly where I wanted the work to exist.

In that sense, I think the work is completed in the viewer's mind. The object stays the same, but each person brings their own experiences to it. During the opening, one visitor had a very strong emotional reaction because the precarious balance reminded him of a suicide he had experienced in his family. That was never the subject of the work, but it became part of his encounter with it. I find those moments fascinating. Once a work leaves the studio, it begins to accumulate meanings that belong as much to the viewer as they do to me.

Success is relative. I rarely experience it in the present because I'm already thinking about the next work. But if I could show my seventeen-year-old self where I am today after being told by a philosophy teacher that I wouldn't achieve anything in life, I think he'd be pleasantly surprised.