“(...) Irlo’s mind is an all-encompassing, all-validating, all-integrating phenomenon.

It is not at all difficult to imagine the convolutions of his brain glowing in fluorescent colors. And that, come evening, his joyful, buoyant neural circuits gather to confer, to converse in lively Transylvanian vernacular, perhaps in an extraterrestrial register, about what to do, what to undo, and what else to remake in order to run a rounded, inclusive, aggregated inner cosmography. A world in which God, reptilians, bean soup with onion salad, Mesoamerican shamanism, fairy tales, tall tales, jokes, sayings, social uprisings, and radical acts of plunder can coexist under the same roof. (...)

Irlo’s brain runs an expanding pluriverse. It is a kind of phantasmagorical laboratory in which ideas explode, multiply, collide, and reassemble into colorful imaginary constellations. Irlo plays not only with the world inside his own head, but also with the worlds inside ours. He blends and ironizes entire families of imaginary galaxies, which he translates onto surfaces as transpersonal affective maps of a universal childhood, where forms and characters breathe earthly air, laugh, frown, form alliances, gossip, or comment on the evening news.

The artist’s visual narratives do not represent an alternative reality of childhood, but rather metabolize its magical substitutions. He processes them through his fluorescent neural network and offers them, candidly and without disguise, to the viewer. Children are not afraid to voice what they think. Censorship and fear slip quietly into our souls later, nourished by social pressures, norms of good conduct, political correctness, parental prohibitions, social ideologies, and so on.

This explains the courage to lay color over the wounds of the Romanian nation and to transpose our pains onto canvas with disarming humor.

The invariant of the series *Stolen Nation: A Strand of Irlonies* is the theft of the Coțofenești Helmet exhibited at the Drents Museum. (...)

The episode captured in the modular painting *The Children of Coțofenești* is the key to reading the series. Irlo carries the helmet across the world and recontextualizes it in satirical circumstances that take the form of mocking visual quotations. The irlonies are placed, of course, within easily recognizable, popular frameworks, drawn either from our fairy tales, legends, and histories, or from contemporary Romanian reality. The artist does not shy away from symbolically isolating and reiterating themes of corruption, betrayal and manipulation, the theft of material values, and the lack of spiritual substance, in their continuous forms, from the spoliations of Classical Antiquity to the present day.

*Excavated Nation* speaks about the condition of Transylvanian peasants during Austro-Hungarian domination, while *The Ducks Come from the Trucks* reminds us of the dove that emerged from the mouth of the first president of Romanian democracy. Out of respect for history and for the deceased individual, Irlo does not depict his face, instead illustrating the memorable phrase laterally, through a small tractor pulled by a duckling tattooed with Cucuteni ceramic motifs. The work *Chuck Nordis* completes the strand of irlonies. It portrays Chuck Norris dressed in garments adorned with Cucuteni motifs, his face painted in the Romanian tricolor, wearing the golden helmet atop his iconic hat. This is a clear and harsh reference to the Nordis Scheme and to contemporary political chaos, which Irlo perceives as a poorly articulated B-movie constructed on second-rate Hollywood templates.

The artist strings these ironies along the thread of bitter humor. “Irlony” is the invented term through which he assumes and reaffirms the self-ironic gene of Romanian cultural identity, an attitude sustained by an entire visual, literary, theatrical, and cinematic tradition. Irlo appears here as the heir to Caragiale’s legacy, Creangă’s half-brother from another mother, and a contemporary ally of *Academia Cațavencu*.

An abused nation, a stolen nation, a lost nation, yet a nation rediscovered each time through anecdotes, mockery, riddles, and stories. These are the pills carefully preserved in the pharmacy of the Romanian soul, with whose help we can endure anything. A nation at play, a bored nation, a tired nation, passing through times that have stirred us more deeply than we would have wished. A nation talked away, driven mad by some or others, bound to histories, a wandering nation. Yet a nation that always delights in life, in a good joke and in the blue of the skies. A resourceful nation, a joyful nation, an awakened nation. Therefore, a nation with chance and with meaning.”

— **Gilda Ghinoiu, Curator**

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### Biographical Note

**Irlo** (Laurențiu Alexandrescu, b. 1985, Bistrița) created his first mural intervention at the age of twelve, a precocious gesture that announced a later artistic trajectory marked by pure irony and fully assumed social confrontation. His first major controversy occurred at the exhibition *Freedom for the Lazy People*, organized by the Romanian Cultural Institute in New York, an episode that consolidated his position as an artist impossible to overlook. He provoked another controversy at the Brukenthal Museum where, together with Șoimii Șatrei Crew, he produced a reinterpretation of *The Massacre of the Innocents* by Pieter Bruegel the Elder.

He is co-founder of **Novus Ordo Muralis (NOM)**, an emblematic urban guerrilla group. NOM gained major media attention in the spring of 2014, when the mural *Saint George and the Playful Dragon* was erased by authorities. The work openly expressed a still-unresolved point of tension between academic art, tradition, iconographic canons, and the rebellion of street art.

Irlo holds the Romanian record for the largest painting, covering an area of 6,500 square meters, located in Cernica, Ilfov County, Romania.