Filcai

ROMANIAN VERSION

Liviu Alexa (born in Bistrita, Romania, on May 31, 1979) trained to become a French language teacher, but ended up as an investigative journalist instead. He debuted in art this year with his first personal painting exhibition, entitled "We are the Apocalypse", and surprised the public with another side of his personality, much less known and deeply unexpected.

His second solo exhibition — Filcǎi — has its own surprising story.

"Initially, I wanted to focus on a story centered on 'demons', but then I had another idea. It was right under my nose, in my own library: the tarot cards drawn in the 80s by the magnificent Dalí," he says Alexa.

The story behind this remarkable artistic endeavor deserves to be known. It all started with a proposal from Hollywood for the 1973 James Bond film Live and Let Die, where the producers needed a spectacular deck of cards for the character Solitaire. Dalí immediately accepted, but his huge ego and exorbitant financial demands caused the producers to drop him in favor of another artist.

Liviu Alexa realized that there was in Romania — more specifically in Transylvania, Dracula's famous "headquarters" — a well-known card game called Filcǎi, the game of commuters, the game played at funerals or in the pub neighborhood, one that enjoyed incredible fame during the communist period.

"It is still played today in many families, but somehow this more… plebeian card game never crossed the borders of Transylvania — it is completely unknown in the rest of Romania. It is a very fast game that requires attention, teamwork and luck — a subcultural artifact, because its origins are remarkably interesting and, like any subculture, through images created for playing cards since the Habsburg Empire, worked as a form of resistance against Austro-Hungarian rule.

My obsession is this: that this game — Filcǎi — does not disappear from social memory. So I decided to dedicate my work and inspiration to it and redraw the entire pack of 20 cards in the form of paintings, imagining new characters for them — a mixture of stories of decrepit heroes, forgotten gods, modern kings and even mythological figures that even you have forgotten, not to mention our children who no longer read anything. It is my humble sign of respect for the humble roots that I have and that many of you have," says the artist.

Filcǎi - a subcultural artifact with roots incredible

It is a very alert game, which requires cleverness, team spirit, luck, a game that has created a special lexicon: the trump, the king, the legate, the servant, the master, the friš, the queen, a subcultural artifact, because its origins are very interesting and, like any subculture, through the designs imagined for the playing cards since the time of the Habsburg Empire was a kind of resistance to the Austro-Hungarian dictatorship.

The story of playing cards is closely related to the work of Friedrich Schiller - "Wilhelm Tell". 

The great romantic poet Friedrich Schiller wrote the founding myth of Switzerland in verse: the legend of Wilhelm Tell. For the Land of the Cantons, under Habsburg rule, freedom was an unattainable dream. Until one day, when Wilhelm Tell proved to the bastard Gessler (Hermann Geszler, the demonic Imperial Governor) that he was the best and bravest archer in the whole land.

Secure on his arm and eagle eyes, provoked by his master, Wilhelm Tell took the arrow from the quiver, drew his bow and aimed perfectly at the apple on the son's head his This was the first step towards the liberation of Switzerland from the Habsburg yoke.

It was the time before the Revolution of 1848, when anti-Habsburg sentiments were strong, and Wilhelm Tell, the hero of Swiss origin, was a symbol of this struggle. 

A Hungarian painter, József Schneider, drew the playing cards I'm talking about around 1835 in Budapest.

If he had drawn personalities with Hungarian names, the game would not have passed the censorship. 

The game was a fulminant success, spreading throughout the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but also in Germany. It "died" for quite a long time, but revived under mysterious conditions in communist Transylvania, most likely as an anti-boredom solution for commuter workers who sat for hours on the train or in stations.