Artists: Dan Cebotari, Ciprian Ciobanu, Anca Adina Cojocaru, Gloria Grati, Imminent Detour / Andreea Samoilă, Lucian Indrei, Mirela Ivanciu, Raluca Micula, musz, Szabó Anna-Mária.
Curators: Diana Marincu & Mihai Toth
“Feels like it stopped raining” explores the emergence of a feeling in response to a turn of events, a discovery, a sensitive subject, an image found and rediscovered, a simple sound, a tender gesture, a moment of solace; an exhibition that reveals itself, laying bare its own vulnerability and tension through subtle movements and delicate interventions. The exhibition’s identity is woven from the artists’ works, which reflect both their desire to share a particular situation and a certain reserve—an attempt to keep the intimate space of that special moment muted, through the intention to protect a state of mind surrounding a personal experience.
Without proposing a singular theme or a linear narrative, the exhibition “listens” to those almost imperceptible transformations that occur when something changes within us. Even the proposed title suggests a moment of awareness, which comes hand in hand with a suspension of tension, a temporary clarity, a fragile form of reconciliation. The works gathered here explore these intermediate states, situated between closeness and distance, between exposure and withdrawal, between the need to communicate and the desire to keep something just for oneself.
Through subtle gestures, sensitive materials, and images steeped in memory, the artists construct a space of fluid observation, in which fragility does not appear as a weakness, but as a form of resilience. Each work functions as a trace of an experience or as a fragment that does not seek to explain fully, but rather to leave room for intuition, projection, and recognition. The invited artists came together naturally, as if drawn together by a particular sensibility that allows them to communicate on the same wavelength and to establish a register of discretion and naturalness through which art becomes part of life and vice versa. Their gestures, sometimes imperceptible, pierce the visible layer of existence, seeking that thread of personal authenticity through which art flickers endlessly, regardless of how what we call “stage,” “context,” “practice,” and “career” appear.
One of the first artists invited was Anca Adina Cojocaru (b. 1981), from Bucharest, a woman of absolute discretion who views art as a mechanism for survival—as poetic as it is, at times, ironic. Within the same “family,” we can also place the work of the artist known as Imminent Detour (b. 1996), who searches, within the realm of the familiar, for those “flecks” of reality that produce poetic inserts of words, shadows, and traces—tools for combating clichés and rigidity. Mirela Ivanciu (b. 1970) is an artist with a surprising career path, concerned with time, impermanence, and interdependence as concepts that can build bridges between drawing, poetry, and embroidery. Gloria Grati (b. 1972) views the creative process with equal patience, particularly the distinct stages of ceramics, where fire has its own rhythm and clouds are the size of the palm in which they are held. Musz collects “moments,” and here the screenshots form a diary, while the bouquets of flowers bear witness to the most important moments of her life. Szabó Anna-Mária (b. 1989) paints the invisible and succeeds in transforming the brushstroke—the gesture—into a character. Ciprian Ciobanu (b. 1999), in turn, explores the gestural nature of writings, scribbles, and quick notes into which the unconscious slips as an unbeatable visual “guide.” Lucian Indrei (b. 1983) photographs “perception,” not the subject, seeking the image in which truth and fiction touch the same fine line between emotion and credibility. Dan Cebotari (b. 1998) creates installations and sculptures that take an ironic look at technology, politics, and consumerism, and here, in the exhibition, the mosquito net arbitrarily divides two worlds, suggesting a general sense of uncertainty. Raluca Micula uses performance to explore the limits of visual perception, creating a tension between the visible and the invisible, while also employing sound as an extension of the field of vision.
In a highly poetic text, Marcel Duchamp described the concept of “infra-thin” as a transition between two moments, as the potential for becoming, and as an allegory. Infra-mince is the shadow, it is the warmth of the chair someone sat in before you, it is the reflection in the mirror, it is the distance between the sound of the fired bullet and the hole it makes, it is the mist of steam on the surface of objects, it is the sound of velvet pants as you walk. Everything that cannot be understood through words can be touched only through sensation, through this poetics of the ephemeral.
“Feels like it stopped raining” becomes an encounter with those moments that are hard to define but deeply familiar, in which a state shifts slowly, and the world seems to rearrange itself around it. The exhibition invites us to approach these forms of sensitivity and to dwell, if only for a moment, in their suspended space.
This project does not necessarily reflect the views of the National Fund Administration. The AFCN is not responsible for the content of the project or for how its results may be used. These are entirely the responsibility of the grant recipient.
