In autumn the days are shorter, time is merciless, you see “No light / No joy,” and you are bound to “always admit that your talent is far too small and your pretensions far too great” (Mitroi: 20.VII.1973).

Several months ago, files, folders, and bundles of notebooks, drawings, works on wood and metal — forgotten in storage for nearly 20 years — were (re)discovered. Over 600 previously unseen pieces, which had never before been exhibited, now come to complete the base of an unfathomable pyramid of meaning called Florin Mitroi. These works make up a large part of those shown in Florin Mitroi’s Autumn: a personal season like a fierce beast, tumultuous, full of passion, pain, and ecstasy.

In moments of reckoning at the close of shortened days — a harsh, rigorous, and inescapable reckoning such as Mitroi’s — what do you do if you come to believe that “Every moment is a humiliation / And life has passed you by”? (Mitroi: 20.VII.1973). What do you do when you are convinced that you have no oeuvre, only failures, that you are not progressing but regressing? You come to think you will never attain what you seek that it simply does not exist.

But what if you are mistaken? What if your failures prove to be the cornerstones of an unparalleled edifice? Florin Mitroi was quick to make pessimistic assessments, inclined to judge his own creation with extreme harshness — over 90% of it he never exhibited, and the few works he did show in his sole solo exhibition he bitterly regretted. Only after his passing could the bottomless abyss of a suffocating and at the same time exhilarating oeuvre be sounded. 

An oeuvre driven forward, to peaks of formal perfection and moral desolation, by the very unfavorable reckonings its author made systematically. An author who left behind more than 8000 works, meant to probe the dehumanized condition down to the finest fibers of fear.

Mitroi’s Autumn is the season of his self-flagellation and of our delight.