The artist Nicu Ilfoveanu returns to Iași with a new photo exhibition, which opens on Wednesday, May 21, at 6:00 PM, at Artep Gallery, in the presence of the artist and curator Ioana Mandeal.
The Artep Gallery Association develops this approach in the context of the project “IMATERIAL or about the matter of photographed worlds”, co-financed by the Administration of the National Cultural Fund (AFCN). The exhibition represents the second stage of the project, and broadens the field of interest of artistic research towards the conceptual and technical possibilities of photography in working with the archive and experiments in typo-photography.
In this sense, Nicu Ilfoveanu conducted a visual research on rare old books from the Central University Library “Mihai Eminescu” in Iași, where the artist continues to work on his “imaginary museum”. Fragments of old illustrated volumes, the outline of the typographic ink, the patina of the paper, the imprint of lint, the shadow of the letters, and the grain of dust thus form a new poetics of the ruin. Isolated, reframed, monumentalized, the images are read halfway between spatial and two-dimensional, object and drawing, trace and matter.
“In traditional typography, the relationship between image and word follows a well-defined temporal register of production. The first phase – avant la lettre – designates the moment of printing the image on paper, before the meaning is anchored by the word. The second phase – avec la lettre – marks the coexistence of the visual and the textual, the stage in which the inscription joins the illustration. But what happens après la lettre – when images are extracted from their original time and reactivated in the present, in a beyond of their existence? Like Peter Handke’s deceptively simple poem – “Hier steht was auf dem Papier” – Nicu Ilfoveanu’s works interrogate not only what we see, but how we come to see, when the source is erased and the whole disappears. Going beyond citation, the artist recovers and amplifies visual remains, transferring them from one regime of meaning to another. “Once the letter dissolves – like a ghost image – we have no choice but to keep looking,” details Ioana Mandeal, the exhibition’s curator.
As part of the exhibition “Après la lettre”, a series of debates related to the themes of the photographic approach carried out by Nicu Ilfoveanu will be organized in May and June, in which the following will participate: Andreas Bolm, Ruxandra Demetrescu and Alexandra Gulea.
The exhibition can be visited in Iași between May 21 and July 3, 2025.
