The Sun At Its Zenith Holds The Balance Of The Day

20th February - 13th April 2025

Artists: Maria Brâneț, Ingrid Farcaș, Camilia Filipov, Lucia Ghegu, Alina Ion, Ana Ionescu, Diana Popuț, Ana Maria Szöllösi

Curated by: Norbert Filep

Location: Sector 1 Gallery

Enveloped in melancholy, introspection deepens the mystery of the self, oscillating between childhood memories and the emptied silences of the end. Time is the invisible thread that connects them all: beneath the blue dome, at its highest point, the sun becomes the enchanted secondary force of this steady weighing. The drawing created by the perpendicularity of ultraviolet rays fixes shadows into the very contours of mother-forms. These, anchored for a moment by the solar apex, become the murky copy of atomic configurations, doubling the elements of space into abstract isometries, reflected in Ana Maria Szöllösi’s painting. Here, memory becomes the active component, structured dialogically in the relationship between the mature pictorial gesture and the freshness of the forgotten drawing, characteristic of a distant childhood. In contrast, the visual weight of the painted matter becomes effervescent in Camelia Filipov’s works on paper. The natural pigment of the plants used in the development of these works evokes the eternal instability of nature, of constant alteration, marked by the perishable garment of time. On the other hand, the fiery play of fixing the binary elements of natural space-time into a constant state of recollection, in the form of infinite renderings of filmic material, contradicts this passage of time. In the video, the interval denies the perishable factor and becomes a constant, precise element, accessible with a simple press of a switch.
Drawing, as well as ordinary materials that can be transformed into socio-critical recontextualizations, outlines the artistic trajectory of Alina Ion. The fight against the excessive passage of the new capitalized time, and the structures and mechanisms that facilitate this incessant flow, becomes visible in the colored pencil analyses to which the artist’s dwelling is subjected, the environment where all external informational flux overflows. The abstract forms of a geological capitalism recycle information through paper, resizing it through processes of craftsmanship from a flat surface to a three-dimensional one. The perforated surfaces in Diana Popuț’s works reveal distant memories of erosions through which nature and time constantly shape the geography of space, highlighting the entropic witnesses that distort the rhythm of order. This disorder is also characteristic of the support in the Duality series, where the artist amplifies the antinomic character between the uneven coloring of the old paper and the refinement of a drawing executed with almost mathematical precision. Precision is the key factor in Ingrid Farcaș’s works, where the pattern and weave are the basic molecules of her practice. With a magical character, the impression left by these works coagulates around a temporal suspension, where the viewer can lose themselves in a pause that defies the organic logic of time. Lucia Ghegu uses three-dimensional construction extracted from the memory of objects with potential utilitarian possibilities. Through Playground of Self-Made Traps and the series of maquettes-works Self-made Traps, temporal space is encapsulated in the dimension of these quasi-utopian architectural fictions. With an interrogative role, these works question the ways in which social constructs dictate the nature and aesthetics of habitable spaces. Antinomic to Lucia’s structures, Ana Ionescu’s object-installations invoke times long past, whose aesthetic sensitivity is filtered through the lenses of ritual and magic. Thus, the binary component of elements belonging to a contradictory discourse is activated by the tension between natural, organic elements and the symmetrical sanctity through which they are distributed in space. Memory constitutes a key subject in Maria Brâneț’s practice. Her interest in the changes brought about by the passage of time is questioned both through the effects on the human body and on everyday objects. Thus, the mask becomes an interpretation of the human face as a space for archiving emotions, identity, and history, emphasizing a constant duality between the fragile and the durable. Take evokes the balance that materializes identity through objects. The patina left by one’s own hands subtly erodes their surface, preserving the traces of time’s passage and human experience. From point to gesture, from on to off, the exhibition follows the natural flow of this temporal flux, so well captured in the nostalgic verses of Lucian Blaga’s poem În marea trecere (In the Great Passage). The practices of the eight artists shape the great passage through a visual and conceptual diversity, leaving behind fragments and traces that constitute their own searches, their own passages through time.

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