Statement
Ladder with embroidered yoke, bridal face, heddles and looms, painted sheet metal, a distaff of wool, gilding on azure, dung and ash, a rebellious demon, light with eyes, apotropaic of shadows.
A gateway to the other realm.
Archetypes—deeply rooted in our subconscious. From where they are reborn and erupt, from where they rise and wander along the pathways of our minds. Ancient representations, ancestral myths, time-worn symbols. Innate dispositions that guide human behavior, forming the very content of the collective unconscious, which comes to be composed of mythological motifs and primordial images. Through dreams and visions, they populate thought and influence existence—not only in the past, but also now, here, in the world of computers, among reels, codes, and messages. We cannot escape them. They do not abandon us; we carry them with us, beside us, within us. They follow and influence us, haunt and guide us.
The exhibition Arhenex: archetypes chained, braided, bound—
from past to present, and into the future.
Works by students and professors of the Painting Department, Faculty of Visual Arts and Design.
A flowering gate. Toward the sky, toward light, toward “the world beyond the horizon.” A gate toward the earth.
“Man is like grass… the wind passes over him and he is gone, and his place knows him no more” (Psalm 102).
Flowers and trees from the fingers of the ancestors. Branches from their hands. Roots from their bleeding hearts. Crimson trees, droplets of leaves growing toward the earth, into the earth.
A ladder with shirt-flowers. With stripes of woven cloth. And steps between worlds—
from here to there, from there, beyond.
Pillars and staffs suspended from the sky. Wedding veils, an old woman’s eye, the flower of soreancă, seeds threaded on string. On the thread. Warp threads. Wool threads. Threads of life. Threads of time. Braided, twisted, spun among traces of looms and weavings.
Painting—in oil, acrylic, watercolor.
On canvas, metal, wood, fabric.
Drawing. Installation. Objects.
Old techniques and newer ones.
Speaking of the archetypes that structure and transform us, that come from behind us, from the ancient past we carry within. And yet—current. Present. Active. A universal given, received at birth within the human psyche. An archive of wisdom and a crossroads of the new.
University Professor Codrina Ioniță
If I were to imagine myself in the role of a “surgeon” of words, this would mean decoding the significance of the title Arhenex and revealing that it is, in fact, an imaginary linguistic and semantic play referring to the powerful connection (-nex) with our collective and implicit individual past (the archaic period), a past that coherently shapes our identity.
Traditional symbols found in folk costume, as well as old objects, are recontextualized and interpreted through a contemporary lens, according to the vision of each individual spirit. This takes place within a framework that addresses not only the specificity of Romanian culture, but also Rwandan, Thai, and Brazilian cultural elements, which are harmoniously integrated into the structure of the traditional Romanian visual language.
The exhibition was conceived as a unified whole, as a living organism whose “anatomical” parts communicate essentially with one another, “breathing” together in a long-fraught, ancestral silence.
University Lecturer Ioana Palamar
Presentation
