SLEEPWALKERS AROUNDLINE
MIRCEA BUT. DAVID FARCAȘ
online, offline, aroundline
Space = on, off, around a line
Space = a line accompanying the distances
between what is and what is not around it
"An exile is not only one's own absenting from a defined space, but also a consent to a fictive reverie suspended outside time and space. The space we occupy means more than 'place', more than an area measurable in sq meters that we can occupy with our physical body. Work space, home or the place of exile become more of a nomadic mental repertoire situated at closer or farther distances from our physical location."
"Sleepwalkers aroundline occupies a space reminiscent of the corporate offline, of the 9 to 5 pattern, a physical place now functioning as host to the finished art work. However, art does not "parasitize" the space but, by occupying it, it ameliorates it. The subconscious archive in which the works of the two artists are anchored, brings together interwoven images of scenes which have been already seen with ones never witnessed before. Déjà vu is therefore not completely abandoned, but inscribed with those fantastic lines discovered in the fictive exile from reality. Like sleep-walking. Like walking (through) the subconscious. Like walking aroundline."
"The fact that Mircea But spends his time close to the land, in a rural environment where earth is primarily soil rather than just a base for concrete, is a form of physical exile. But his paintings have been seduced by landscape before he was drawn to living in the countryside. The catalyst in this exodus is the sense of limitation in the local climate, but can also be the desire to expose himself to those unforeseen images from nature that remain untamed even after being exposed to the gaze."
Price: 3000 €
"What permeated his imagination in prior paintings as an inverted metabolism of the tree-entity, with its roots growing empty in the sky, orientated upwards, remains present only in the subconscious now. The tree entity becomes a part of a revised and altered whole metabolism. In this exhibition, the absence of figure in Mircea But's landscapes is just a trompe-l'œil, whereby the gaze searches for a human figure as a landmark for a personage.
"As one cannot see a human figure, maybe just transient in these imaginary spaces, one could easily comprehend his works as landscapes without personages. His landscape is a character in itself, whose organic elements are tangled in the proximity of fragments of domestic buildings. This animated skeleton, the personage-landscape, is not tamed, but left in an almost romantic, sublime way to seize all the lines of space.
"David Farcaș is also in exile. He finds this place in a mental space rather than a physical one. The "place" of exile yields primacy to the "space" of exile."
