Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article
Art in America, July, 1996 by Janet Koplos

The Romanian artist Dan Perjovschi, 35, was in residence at Franklin Furnace in November and December, where he showed what must have been more than a thousand drawings. Some were more important for what he did with them than for their content; others were pointedly illustrative, to be expected from an artist who makes his living doing caricatures for a Bucharest newspaper.
The heart of the show was a performance, Anthroprogramming, which continued over several weeks. Perjovschi marked a loose grid on the walls of the exhibition space, including the two-story front gallery, and filled each little box with a crudely childlike but expressive sketch of a person, some grimacing, some impassive, some making excited gestures. They seemed infinite in variety and number, although there was some repetition.
Once the walls were filled, Perjovschi began to erase, effacing a few square feet each day. One thinks instantly of the celebrated Erased de Kooning Drawing of Robert Rauschenberg. Perjovschi had never heard of it until visitors to the exhibition told him. It's not an apt comparison anyway. Rauschenberg, in a young man's gesture, was killing his artistic father. Perjovschi had a different motive. The subtext of his action seemed to be "easy come, easy go," if one thought of the little cartoon figures as individual portrayals, obliterated at the whim of their creator. If, on the other hand, one thought of the drawings not as depictions but as representative of artistic endeavor in more general terms, the performance seemed to be about self-censorship. Both readings are appropriate to someone only recently released from the confines of a dictatorship.
On a table in the back room, groups of drawings of various sizes were bundled neatly with the smallest on the top, each group squashed together with an oversize C-clamp. The deforming pressure of the clamp was enough to give one a headache and revised the sense of the wall drawings from "grids" to "cells." Yet for the most part, the tone of the drawings was not agonized, not even plaintive. All the figures were animated, energetic, alive. Often they seemed to be slyly mugging, and there was even cause to laugh at some. The humor blossomed when one looked at a book of drawings Perjovschi made on his first visit to the U.S., in 1994. Titled Postcards from America and published by Tribeca's Pont La Vue Press in 1995, it consists of spiral-bound postcard-size leafs recording his takes and mistakes on new situations in America--violence, friendliness, art politics, television, fitness, time, noise. A sense of humor, we might hope, can never be erased.