Works
About
Gaep is pleased to present Memories and Prophecies, an exhibition featuring works by six artists represented by the gallery – Răzvan Anton, Théo Massoulier, Tania Mouraud, Damir Očko, Cătălin Pîslaru, and Mihai Plătică – alongside two invited artists – Roberta Curcă and Vlad Nancă. The group show examines links between past, present, and future, suggesting that imagining the future is itself a form of memory and that our visions of what lies ahead are particularly revelatory of what we feel now. Across painting, sculpture, drawing, photography, and collage, the participating artists engage with time in multiple ways: as a material, a process for making, a cycle, a journey,a lens for analyzing change, or in relation to space and the universe.
A focal point of Memories and Prophecies is Cătălin Pîslaru’s new painting The Oracle, whose genesis reflects the artist’s fascination with both art history and genre-bending, Tarantino-esque narratives. Taking Velázquez’s Las Meninas – “an icon of compositional harmony” – as a point of departure, Pîslaru imagines a scenario in which the main character is taken away by “beings unlike any angel or demon, tall, silver creatures with eyes that reflected galaxies”; her enigmatic disappearance drives scholars to speculate that the famous painter “glimpsed a truth so vast that the rest of us cannot endure it”. This imagined story is encapsulated in both Pîslaru’s painting and a text written by the artist to accompany it.
Other forms of heightened insight, grounded in analytical inquiry rather than clairvoyance, appear in the photographic works of Mihai Plătică and Tania Mouraud. The former manipulates the RGB color model to obtain alternative versions of a landscape, while the latter collapses the binary oppositions of painting vs. photography and figurative vs. abstract by photographing the chemical reactions occurring on the surface of plastic materials that cover coconut shells used in rubber sap collection.
In his Fading Studies, the results of a heliographic process unfolding over weeks or months, Răzvan Anton seems to excavate latent meanings from images of the past – either photographs or drawings from his family’s collection. Working with sunlight and time as his primary materials, through a radically slow process that evokes a pre-industrial sense of time, Anton implicitly comments on the accelerated modes and tempos of present-day production.
Remnants of the past are recovered and reconfigured by Roberta Curcă into new forms that oscillate between anxiety and optimism toward the future. Repurposing metal and vinyl plates from the heavy and printing industries, her new series Notes Extended investigates how these industrial byproducts, templates, stencils, and voids can be transformed into tools for drawing and thinking – the foundation for a visual and material language of circularity.
Processes of metamorphosis, driven by the systemic crises of the Anthropocene, are central to Théo Massoulier’s practice. His new sculptures, made specifically for this exhibition, act as speculative models of the organisms that might emerge from the entropic conditions we have co-created. Grounded in a belief in the essential interconnectedness of all things surrounding us and fascinated by a scientific thesis about “self-presentation” as a fundamental property of all living beings, Massoulier envisions a future of hybridisation in which spectacular “alien” forms express their particular way of being.
A different speculative approach characterizes Vlad Nancă’s work. His is rooted in 20th-century history, with its modernist architecture, its shift from early utopian ideals to later dystopias, its Space Race, and its glorification of scientific and athletic achievement – as seen, for instance, in the proliferation of murals and mosaics across Eastern Europe. With Future Perfect II, a work conceived for display in the gallery window, Nancă extends his reflection on the predictive function of memory and on the possibilities of a future shaped by women.
Damir Očko’s large-scale collages transpose the names of two phobias – the fear of opening one’s eyes and the fear of stars – into anagrams, prompting viewers to search for hidden details within layered forms, visual fragments, and materials drawn from unusual sources. Despite their subject matter, a joy in making seems to animate these “dragforms” – joy as an affirmation that, despite of everything that is not OK around us, something tender, meaningful, and worth preserving endures.
