The window opens like an orange

Read Time 3 min.

The window opens like an orange

February 1st – March 15th 2025
Curated by Diana Marincu

At the beginning of the 20th century, metaphysical painting proposed a new visual typology based on allusions and illusions from Antiquity and the Renaissance, as well as an enigma. As Giorgio de Chirico defined it, the enigma was the epiphany you get from contact with reality, as if it were seen for the first time. We can extrapolate by suggesting that all art is an enigma in this sense, a way of producing the revelation of pure gaze.

Mihaela Coandă takes this enigma even further, casually showing us what it’s like to look at modernist art as if you’re doing so for the first time. The artist’s visual motifs from her latest series of works are drawn from iconic works by Alexander Calder, Mark Rothko, and sometimes even Joan Miró, animating the pictorial space in the same way Calder destabilized the sculptural one. Iconic sculptures inhabit the canvases like still life with living art to invoke enigma and exceed routine. Painting, said Mihaela Coandă, always slips into breached spaces where you don’t expect it, covering the gaps caused by doubt.

There are two spaces carved out in the paintings that are exhibited here – one that focuses on the representation of reality, where the objects have consistency, matter, and three-dimensionality, and they are materialized onto the canvas, a space governed by gravity; and another of pure plastic language, where shadows have disappeared and conventions vanished, and the symbolic rule is visual knowledge and thought that finds its extension in brushstrokes, directly on the canvas, intensely, even more intensely, but not blunt or definitive. Mihaela Coandă paints space-evoking sculptures of the time, those “mobiles” that never stop moving.

If we look at the first three paintings that are shown to us as we enter the space, we observe an essential triad that structures the entire exhibition: a painting of “modernism-optimism,” where the landmarks of the 20th century meet; another in which still nature is captured as it transforms from inorganic to organic-dynamic; and another which suggests the grace of a swan on the troubled waters of art history, always starting afresh, but in a different manner.

The exhibition title takes a line from the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who is said to have given his name to metaphysical painting, a close associate of the early 20th-century artists and a keen observer of art. In the poem “The Window,” written in response to Robert Delaunay’s painting, the urban space breaks into fragments of sensations and visions, and light emerges as a motif of freedom. In conjunction with the works of Mihaela Coandă, this title calls for an assumed approach to visual and tactile cognition, where the truth is not revealed at first sight but must be discovered under the orange peel offered to us. The untouched gift this time, the unmechanized orange, only occasionally shows its shadow.


Vernissage


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