Eclipse : Andrei Gamarț
The Eclipse series is the result of the artist’s ample exploration of the relationship built between memory – which is an ongoing process of both the individual, as a unit, and humanity, as a collective being – and light, seen as the primary matter which continues to exist in a constant state of oblivion.
Mobius Gallery is pleased to present ECLIPSE, a solo exhibition bringing together the most recent body of works created by Andrei Gamarț between 2017 and 2020.
The exhibition is on display from January 29th to March 20th and may be visited from Wednesday to Saturday, between 2 pm and 8 pm.
Eclipse is a journey into a world where light's memory becomes an instrument for translating reality, Andrei Gamarț introducing another layer into the architecture of his exhibition – a transparent veil installation through which he obturates (once more) the painted images, thus mediating an intimate experience with the source of light. Behind the veil, there are details of an almost tangible world – branches and leaves of trees which hardly allow the passing of a few rays of sunshine (Window, 2020), clouds with primordial shadows (Vertigo, 2019), pieces of pure, dazzling light (#1 and #2, both from the series Blindness, 2019), a series of visions and fragments of reality with an over-exposure of images in a way that turns the whole experience into an outline, a container of light and, at the same time, a witness to its own materiality.
Showcasing works created between 2017 and 2020, the exhibition seems to be the peak of an artistic process in research of time, memory and space through a Bergsonian approach. The projects Shitfting Presence (2013) and This Garden Was Enchanted (2014) seem to be stages of this reference as experiensis of the matter that no longer has a memory, a matter that forgets itself, retrieving its essence directly from light. Even the work that gives the name of the exhibition, Eclipse, painted in 2017, doubled from the theme perspective by the larger work, Blindness, from 2018, refers to the lack of light, the (im)possibility of a life lived in negative photography.
Recent developments, to some extent foreing to his previous projects, such as the small canvases and the warm color palette, give a note of fragility to a personal revelation, generously shared by the artist with the rest of the world. The works from the Eclipse project lose their strange tension of some paintings made before 2017, like a deep breath after an assiduous search, like the ease of finding some edifying philosophical answers, a state even more revealing during this last year of pandemic living.
The poet Andrei Gamarț, “even if he is a painter”, paraphrasing the artist himself, leads us in a painting-poetry in which the shadow and the trace are positioned inside the light, and not in its opposite. His paintings are a reference to subconscious, subliminal personal memories, to what we call mitochondrial memory, a beginning and an end alike, where the viewer’s reaction is visceral: you want to take away your eyes, but you find it impossible to do so.
(Antigona Silvia Rogozea, curator)
Andrei Gamarț (b. 1980, Republic of Moldova) lives and works in Bucharest. He is an artist educated in Chișinău, who is constantly exploring other creative fields such as poetry and literature. His paintings, drawings, and graphic works reveal fractures of a world that seems suspended in-between time and space. The major themes populating this tenebrous and sometimes surreal “counter-reality” tackle the relation between memory and matter, innocence and error.
This project is part of the program aiming to support art galleries in Bucharest initiated by the Capital City Hall through the General Directorate of Landscape, Architecture and Public Monuments, and the Expo Arte Cultural Center.
