Group Exhibitions
"Pursuing Light: A Story of Us Searching for Splendor"
IOMO Gallery, Bucharest, Romania
2024
Curator: Gilda Ghinoiu
The energy generator of the solar system, a modest yellow dwarf, which, in its modesty, transforms 4 million tons of matter into energy every second, and which is brighter than 85% of the stars in the Milky Way, was born 4.6 billion years ago as a result of the gravitational collapse of a molecular cloud.
The Sun has captivated our imagination, perhaps even before we developed bipedal walking, and who knows, perhaps we became vulnerable by adopting this new behavior simply to admire the celestial path of its Majesty. We wouldn’t even have eyes without light, as they would have no purpose, nor would we have warmth or color. We wouldn’t be human, and there would be no Art without the Sun.
From Icarus to the present day, humanity has made consistent efforts to conquer the sun and understand the dual nature of light—both particle and wave. The first artistic revolution was, in part, due to Amenhotep IV’s fascination with the solar disc, and it led to the emergence of the ancestors of caricature, as evidenced in the limestone profiles at Tell-el-Amarna. Giordano Bruno, too, perished at the stake for his thoughts on the stars, and Copernicus shook humanity to its core by replacing geocentrism with heliocentrism—a collective trauma we still carry with us, displacing us from the center to the periphery of the universe.
Sol Invictus (Unconquered Sun) symbolized the state of grace of the telluric elements, which alchemists would knead in crucibles, wander through sweet retorts, and bake in the athanor, yearning for immortality—until Jung, through his theses, managed to demystify alchemy, showing us that Ars Magna is a metaphor for the search for the Self, for subconscious dives, while Sol Invictus symbolizes the seed of the divine, the inner sun. From our inner small, hot, and mortal shining suns, we extract the elementals of Art, the most effective form of healing, salvation and transcendence into Eternity. Through Art, we are making ourselves immortal. The artists are the alchemists who, through their creations, reveal to us the image of the collective consciousness managing to freeze time.