“About death and life”, the group exhibition recently opened at Relicvar Gallery in Cluj-Napoca, brings together works by the artists Ana Lupaș, Mircea Spătaru and Rodica Svințiu. The exhibition revolves around Dorin Panga, an artist whose life ended too soon yet left a lasting impact on his generation.
“We can only talk about Dorin Panga’s passage through the world in an apophatic key, looking at him through the inverted prism of the negative path – just like his destiny remaining in the shadows. For we can say of him only what he is not or only what he might have been because he failed to be fully either in life or in art. And that was because his life was cut short and mercilessly right above the golden branch graft. However, the force of his talent managed to impose itself in his generation, in his short and tragic life as a man and an artist, because his colleagues clearly perceived it, students of Belle Arte in Cluj during the cruelest years of the totalitarian regime in Romania, the 50s.
Ana Lupaș is today a witness who can still speak about that particular artistic context, including Dorin Panga, more precisely placing the disappearance of their colleague in this plastic discourse “About Death and Life”. For behold, a witness of those times has made it survive beyond time and bring it almost to us today by simple evocation. It is seen again that a witness is enough for the golden branch to illuminate the narrow path in the thicket, a single “yes” said to oblivion for a wonderful fact to happen.
How do we tell the story of the dead, how do we think about their presence among us – or their absence – without denying the irreparable nature of their tragic death? There is no resurrection of the most modest dead that does not lend itself to a new vulgate, no memory of the humble that does not lead to posthumous mythologizing. It is the nature of the simple fact that we have lost them and that we are not Orpheus to bring them back to the light by our panegyrics. Narrating “modest lives (invisible, tiny)” is an inverted duty of memory, that of alerting against a bold recollection that claims to realize now what has never been realized, to bring back to transparency the one who once entered such a radical opacity that, there, he no longer awaits the hour of Judgment. […]
We can now look at Dorin like a shooting star as it lights up the sky. For, as Meister Eckhart says, “the eye with which I see God is the same as the eye with which God sees me.”
Nothing prevents us from seeing the works exhibited with deliberate parsimony as exercises in admiration that can, through their total gratuity and worship, also update the ineffable pattern of Dorin Panga, with his name almost erased, delicately drawn in the ashes of an empty tomb.
They say that every victory is a delayed defeat. This exhibition, dedicated to absences and a tragic unfulfillment, tells us something else, namely that, in the order of the spirit, things are exactly the opposite.” (Excerpt from the curatorial text)
The exhibition can be visited until March 3, 2025. Free entrance.
