On September 3, 2026, at 5:00 PM, MV sci-art center in Timișoara will open its new autumn season, filled with exhibitions, events, and projects, with Oh, Look!, a participatory exhibition experience presented in the alternative space RAFT and conceived around the artistic practice of Jean-Baptiste Joly. The exhibition marks the artistic debut of an individual who, after several decades devoted to supporting and promoting the practices of other artists, is making his own work public for the first time.
Oh, Look! takes its starting point from the line uttered almost in unison by the characters in Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinoceros at the moment the rhinoceros appears. In the exhibition, the expression becomes the point of departure for an encounter with an artistic practice that has developed quietly, away from the institutional sphere in which Jean-Baptiste Joly has spent most of his professional career.
Born in Paris in 1951 and currently based in Berlin, Jean-Baptiste Joly is French and German. Founder and artistic director of Akademie Schloss Solitude, Joly has spent much of his career creating contexts in which the work of other artists could become visible. Alongside this, for nearly thirty years, he has been drawing as an amateur. For him, drawing is a daily practice, a source of relaxation and pleasure, carried out exclusively in 32-page notebooks.
It is precisely this shift in perspective that lies at the heart of the exhibition: after decades spent within large-scale cultural infrastructures, Joly brings one of the most intimate and least monumental formats into the public sphere—the notebook. His watercolors introduce a contradiction that runs throughout the project. The rhinoceros is massive, armored, and brutal; watercolor is fragile, transparent, fluid, and impossible to fully control. The weight of the subject is thus preserved within one of the lightest and most vulnerable artistic techniques.
For curator Jean-Lorin Sterian, encountering these notebooks felt like discovering a hidden gem. In his reading, the emergence of Joly’s work after a professional life dedicated to building visibility for others produces an almost anomalous situation: something unexpected appearing where it was not supposed to be—much like Ionesco’s rhinoceros. The artistic gesture simultaneously becomes a deliberate return to a smaller scale, to work created without an audience and outside the mechanisms of validation of the art world.
Oh, Look! marks Jean-Baptiste Joly’s artistic debut while also opening the new exhibition and events season at MV sci-art center.
The exhibition is presented within RAFT, an artistic manifesto-project initiated by Alina Andrei and George Roșu, which later evolved into an art space in its own right, hosted by—and sometimes “parasitizing”—different cultural environments and spaces. RAFT has operated since 2016 at Fabrica de Pensule in Cluj, until its closure in 2019, as well as at the Contemporary Art Library of the Multicultural Center of Transilvania University in Brașov. In 2017, it participated as an invited artist-run space in the Art Encounters Biennial in Timișoara. Today, the project continues in a decentralized and episodic format, with presences in Brașov, Cluj, Timișoara, Sibiu, and Bucharest, as well as in international contexts.
