Spacetime’s a Wastin’

An avid explorer of uncommon situations, Sebastian Moldovan recomposes his personal experiences as complex artistic projects that challenge the way viewers perceive their surroundings. In most cases, his installations in situ are deliberately uncomfortable, in order to subvert conventional perceptions of an action or an event. The artist usually conceives of the exhibition space as a game involving logic, with a core problem that needs to be analyzed and understood, and different paths – some relatively direct, others more winding – that lead to the solution.

This solo exhibition is grounded in a vehicle accident the artist had in 2019; the collision and the recovery process underlie several of the works presented at Gaep. The impact of time in these new works is more visible than ever before in Moldovan’s activity, especially as the visitors are invited to become accomplices in the actions that overlap – sometimes briskly, other times very slowly – in the gallery rooms.

The artist’s recent interests revolve around a much-discussed topic: black holes. To Sebastian Moldovan, black holes represent extremes of the physical universe because of their gravitational pull and density. They dictate the limits between which existence unfolds, reaching the point where time is compressed and reality is put on hold, turned into a mere intention. In his view, black holes are passages through which only the essential may pass, in an unceasing flow.

Edmund Husserl talks about aspects that originate either in proximity or at a distance, that oscillate between here and there, thus rejecting the idea of an absolute here. This here is located in one’s own body, whose consciousness, despite not being easily perceptible, always accompanies the aspects under discussion. By extrapolating, Moldovan infers a connection between his body (here) and the black holes (aspects). Each aspect can be represented in a multitude of ways. Therefore, an object that we experience in proximity, no matter how familiar it might be, supports various representations, depending on the visual perspective that is chosen or the tactile and acoustic phenomena that accompany the representation.

Branching out in the entire basement of the gallery, one of the in-situ installations emits a distorted sound – an effect resembling the way the artist hears after the accident. His new series of drawings are proofs of a daily work routine that sometimes verges on the obsessive. The artist has come up with the term “scavenger work” to describe his numerous interventions which repurpose either elements of other artists’ works that have been left in the gallery’s spaces or materials that were lying unused in its storage areas.

With Spacetime’s a Wastin’, Sebastian Moldovan offers a body of imaginative exercises calibrated for the understanding of certain human aspects – chaos, death, loss – and presented as a series of constructs that unmistakably follow the laws of physics.