Wednesday, August 6, 2025, from 7 p.m., the opening of the painting exhibition “The Unbearable Lightness of the Absurd” by artist Mariana Hultoană will take place at Borderline Art Space. The exhibition is curated by Lorena Marciuc and can be visited until the end of August.
Man experiences everything on the spot, for the first time and without any preparation. Milan Kundera
“[…] Mentally searching for non-places that would provide coherence to identity, the whole body actually cracks. The mental landscapes appropriated in this way in liminal routes hijack a spatialization of the self, leaving it, in exchange, to collapse under the unbearable lightness of the absurd. What Mari Hultoană succeeds in, however, is to calibrate a simulation of the slow collapse in a second-rate world without the burden of the pressure to organize meaning – for it always remains at a distance. The surrender instead exposes, with absurd grace, the fact that expectation and absence are the real matter of our present and not the systemic organization of everyday semantics.
The pictorial space traced by Mari, one that self-expands outside itself, creates for the one outside the work a situation of being surrounded by one’s own body (Maurice Merleau-Ponty). Duplicates that locate their copies in non-places – like the sequence of the artist’s mother that Google Maps tries to bring to the real plane through algorithmic instantiation – or that trace ontographies (Anselm Franke) through the subtle relationship between works that superimpose, frontally, the idea of the same character in a non-narrative gesture – all these scenographies simulate the volatility of certainty in order to disorganize it. In stasis, the possibility of orientation-through-subjectivation borrows an affective character, because the graphs traced starting from an imaginative (aerial) plane remain, in fact, static, the gaze itself becoming a paradox. What was in motion – an affective mapping, now of an endlessly repeated journey that Mari “closes” and parasitically fixes in another space – can only be viewed from a fixed point. But what has never known movement remains unbearable to look at.
By staging a dialectic of absence, Mari displays a pop-inspired gesture, in which he takes any reality and makes it self-sufficient, namely suitable for evaluation according to criteria (vaguely known and often randomly chosen) which, once fulfilled, give the impression of stability of meaning. Thus, pictorial reality refuses a self-probing of its own value parameters, also rejecting the gesture of creating meaning, for in a reality where there is no weight, existence becomes volatile, devoid of ultimate consequences and precisely this lack weighs down like an ineffable burden.
To have a body is to have a present. (Henri Bergson)” – curatorial text
Mariana Hultoană (b. 2001, Dorohoi) is a visual artist based in Iași. She graduated from both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Painting at the “George Enescu” National University of Arts and attended international painting courses in Spain. She has participated in national and international exhibitions, including “Cei noi” at MARe – Museum of Recent Art in Bucharest, “Aici și Acum!” – Romanian Creative Week and “Four Elements” (Barbagelata Foundation). Her works have been exhibited in Romania, Spain and the USA, and in Canada she collaborated on a video art project. In 2025 she was selected for the “Catalyst – Cred în România” project. Her artistic practice investigates contemporary painting as a space for reflection on silence, identity and the absurd.
