Dan Perjovschi, the artist known for his humorous, satirical and ironic in-situ drawings on museums and gallery walls all over the world, is talking about ‘free style’, the art system, and his sense of citizenship.


Iliana Fokianaki: Your works are very much based on a direct dialogue with the viewer. You display your thoughts, that viewers can relate and agree/disagree with, and there occurs an internal dialogue in the viewer's mind. When creating these drawings, is your candidate viewer, a point of reference or limitation?

Dan Perjovschi: Since 1991 I draw every week about social and political realities in my country and publish the drawings in the Romanian weekly 22. I get direct feedback from my colleagues at the job and from the readers. Since 2000 I draw extensively about social, political and cultural issues of the world and I  do this in museums, galleries and newspapers around the world. I got a lot of feedback through blogs and direct talks. First I draw in my notebook for me to understand, then I draw on a public museum wall bearing in mind a certain standard reader/viewer: intelligent, up to date, curious, open-minded. There is no limitation, only responsibility.

IF: You mention responsibility and in my mind comes a somewhat forgotten aspect of art making for some artists. How strict are you when it comes to looking at totally ‘irresponsible’ art?  Should art always have responsibility?

DP: I am not exactly the one to be asked to create frames, borders and limits, but yes! I think artists should maintain a sense of responsibility. Everybody should. We all are more intelligent than we look. And act.

IF: And talking about the term responsibility, it comes with the sense of citizenship in a social realm, doesn’t it? Do artists have to maintain their identity as citizens? Or do they need to escape this sometimes?

DP: Right now I feel being citizen of the planet.  But I don’t have a problem nor I reject my double legal citizenship as Romanian or European.

IF: Many of your works have occurred in institutional spaces such as the Tate. The ‘emblem’ of an artist’s ‘importance’ is the display of his works in such spaces. Your position through your work is questioning this ‘importance’. However, how does an artist continue to comment on the ‘art system’ objectively when actually inside this system?

DP: I have a drawing made out of the words ART MARKET, where arrows underneath the drawings are measuring the length of each words so its clear ‘market’ is bigger than ‘art’. This is how I do as a critical artist inside the art system … and by the way at Tate I draw the Members Room, at MoMA and Vanabbe the lobby, at Salzburg Kunstverein the corridor. I get all this shitty spaces which keep me radical. The system acknowledges and recognizes my position. In my main artistic appearance I can’t be collected and owned. The market have only my derivatives (notebooks, documentation, leftovers). I found my space in the system: I am free style.

IF: An instant smile came after reading your answer, since very few artists have the courage and in the end get the success in finding their way in the system by maintaining radicalism and ‘free style’, as you said. Is this a position where you feel that you have the benefit of a — let’s say — clear vision?

DP: I try to enjoy my ‘freedom’ and celebrate all the chances to speak I am given: walls, floors or windows, being aware about the impossibility of behaving as outsider while inside the system. The equilibrium is fragile. Like walking on a rope … This is why I cut all ‘nice’ and ‘arty’ bits from my drawings living them simple, brutal, and heavy ironical. And this is why I am still located in Romania. Drawings and location can keep me edgy.

IF: You have said in a recent interview that your current medium of drawing could have sprung from your earlier drawings as a schoolboy using your talent ‘to mock your teachers’. In many drawings and performances you have ‘mocked’ politics in your country (due to all political changes that occurred after the ’80s and 1991) but also you seem to be interested in globalisation, as well as the capitalistic model of today and how that is applied and functions in the Western world. In the past art was for you a refuge from reality. How about today? Does art when political in the contemporary world can actually convey a message of essence for the public?

DP: When I mocked my teachers I was young and restless. In the meantime I grew smart. I mock no one. What interest me is to simply and quickly graphically convey a situation. I use drawing to understand things. The same I did with performances. It was a way to understand my context and to have a intellectual response to it. Since 1995 in my artistic projects I draw more about the world than about my country (but art historians, the press and curators don’t seem to realise this). I am a citizen of the world now. The work is my reference system … During the last decade of communist regime I did some art works and projects outside the reach of the censorship, an escape, a way to protect my mental integrity. But since 1991 there is no need for me to run away. Exactly the opposite. I want to be ‘in’. As much as possible. Just look at me: for the last five years I do two projects per month. I never stop drawing. The world is for me an extraordinary source of ideas. And to answer you question, yes I can find trough my drawings the essence of things and yes I can communicate it to people, from the director to the guardian of the museum, from the humble visitor to the most sophisticated art analyst.

IF: Why is it important for you though to draw more the world than Romania's smaller — as in microcosmos version of the global — world? And, yes this is very true about your work that it does communicate to viewers of all backgrounds. Many visitors in the exhibition told me that it feels as if you say their thoughts out loud. Where do you think may lay the secret of you actually ‘catching’ the pulse, or the majority of people's opinions?

DP: I do not think I made any value statements (smaller, big), I am just crazy curious about what’s going on. If I draw it I understand it. So I am set to understand the world. Being from outside and with a heavy dictatorship experience makes me more aware or sensible on stereotypes and paradoxes of the contemporary world. That’s why people can recognize their thoughts in my own.

IF: Regarding your recent participation in my show Land of Promise -and in relation to many examples of your work (as your Diorama series displayed in this exhibition)- your drawings seem to be an expression of your identity as a Romanian artist and person, commenting on how it is to be the visitor in other countries of Europe. What are your thoughts when it comes to national identity and heritage and how does that affect the everyday of artistic creation — if at all?

DP: I am Romanian and I see things trough my culture. But since more than ten years I am more a citizen of the world than to a particular place in the world. There is no specific ‘Romanian’ understanding of things; there is just a pure wonder and a genuine curiosity who can be Polish, Italian, American or Greek as you wish. I borrow this identity wherever I go — my notebooks transformed into Dioramas show this. Not being tight to something gives me the view from outside the box. I can be fresh in English even if I speak it badly …


Dan Perjovschi was born in Romania in 1961. During the years of dictatorship he studied painting but in the late 80s, not satisfied with the results the medium was giving him, he questioned its role and introduced other ways of expressing such as performance and  drawing. In the late eighties one of his first actions happened in his flat. It was named Red Apples (1988) and it basically entailed of his whole flat being covered in white sheets of paper and him drawing on them. During those turbulent times, together with other artists they formed the group Studio 35. In the mid-’90s together with his partner, performer Lia Perjovschi he organized free workshops-discussions called Open Studio, a think-tank for writers, curators and artists were they could meet, discuss and raise issues on art practice. Since then he has moved on to drawing straight on walls — mostly — and continues to raise eyebrows with his spot-on comments on culture, society and politics. He was one of the participants in the exhibition Land of Promise, part of Remap 2 that took place in Athens between 16 June – 4 October 2009.