The past is a very insistent voice

March 28th – May 10th

Artists: Călin Dumitrașcu, Marius Ghita, Ada Muntean, Maria Stoica, Laurențiu Zbîrcea
Curator: Ada Muntean

The Past is a Very Insistent Voice is a curatorial project that questions the relativity of presence and absence in relation to time and the abstract and concrete interferences between these reference points.

The exhibition comes together as a visual approach suggesting the clearly illusionary character of presence and absence as material and immaterial states. These become self-inclusive, inseparable concepts. Absence cannot be perceived without alluding to the possible existence of a presence.

The theory of relativity transformed the way in which we understand the concepts of time and space, allowing for a particular vision, namely that time is not a “constant flux” moving in a uniform manner, but a flexible dimension, which can be influenced by an object’s speed and the gravitational fields it crosses. This also postulates that the past, the present and the future exist simultaneously in an extended space-time structure, yet our perception is limited to the present moment.

Thus, the past is not “gone” or “lost” but exists objectively within this continuum and our access to it is restricted only by the nature of our subjective experience. More precisely, the past can be viewed as a “dimension” as real and concrete as any other section of the space-time continuum, although we cannot access or experience it directly.

One of the sources of inspiration for this project was metaphysical painting and its conceptual underlayer. The space created by metaphysical painters essentially suggests a void, although created from and excess of matter, of objects painted in a relatively realist fashion, that configurate compositions/ landscapes constructed from “present” elements, placed in an atemporal atmosphere.

The artists’ approaches in the exhibition The Past is a Very Insistent Voice gravitate around interpreting the figurative, actually starting from matter and coming together as objects or bodies describing through the composition and atmosphere an interdependence between presence and absence.

Exploring the human body and living matter comes from a quest for knowledge and self-knowledge that the artists feel while exploring the world. The body (material) becomes a vehicle for expression, as one of the main elements creating the reality everyone knows, as well as the keeper of human experiences (the immaterial). The human body is the intermediary between our self and the world, with which we conceive reality while being shaped and defined by it.

The human body is one of the most relevant and powerful instruments of expression in fine art, that can be found as a reference point in all historical art currents. Whether we talk about it as a technical performance in painting, drawing or sculpture and view it as such since the Renaissance, or we see it as a deconstructed and reconstructed image in Cubism and Futurism and even as a media of instigation and reflection over existence through a performance, the body is an endless source of expression.

Contemporary art offers a very self-conscious view, placing the artists in a position to reimagine the world through a process that starts from within and offers a critical commentary of the intimacy of human conscious and the outside world where people live. The body becomes an intermediary between our consciousness and the world, in a thoroughly personal process, that resembles breaking a mirror and the, impossible, attempt to rebuild it.

The Past is a Very Insistent Voice becomes an offer to question what material and immaterial, presence/ absence, certitude and illusion actually mean, through a synthetic exhibition comprised of the artists’ newest creations.