An artist’s residency. I’ve often asked myself what does an artist’s residency means, for me and for my fellow painters? How do we relate to plein-air and to the intention to capture things in the right light, to the easel, the canvases and the rickety brushes carried through the valleys and over the hills?. When you join an artist’s residency you leave your themes, sketches and ways of doing things in the workshop, you abandon the predictable and efficient comfort of planned, staged, somehow predictable work.
You embark on a journey of apprehension and appropriation of a new territory, as you interfere with the natural spaces, the architectural structures, the local people and the social relationships, driven by the alert gaze of a hunting dog… Armed only with your personal filters, through which you perceive the reality, a fishing net with very small meshes, which extracts threads of meaning from everything that surrounds you. You carefully scan the contours of things in the hope that you will find something that will hold you back and amaze you, as in an unpredictable and unplanned treasure hunt. Enough so that you make room for it in your panoply of topics and themes, enough to give it a few hours, days or weeks of attention.
We embarked on such an adventure last summer, at the invitation of our art colleague Dorin Negrau, who generously hosted us in the living museum of the Traditional Center for Connection to Life. With the intention of saying something about the things carefully put together in the last century, lovingly recovered and staged in the last decade, and about us and our art; about the subtle area of temporary overlaps of these two worlds, as in a well-tempered logical inference.
Curator: Ioana Olăhuț
Some products of this process of discovery and recontextualization are on display until March 25th in Annart Gallery, Andrei Mureșanu Street No.1, Bucharest.
