The Cluj-Napoca Art Museum presents Anca Bodea’s personal exhibition, “CHLORUM,” from November 6 to 29, 2024. At the opening event, the following spoke: Lucian Nastasă-Kovács, MACN manager, the artist and Portik Blénessy Ágota, museographer.
“The permanent witness of our metamorphoses, time is radical.
Unrepeatable time. Time – passage.
Thinking about irreversibility, I began a visual study of time. I stopped with all the analyzing objectives on the passage. The absurd impossibility of going back, the oppressive (unique) direction of the flow of time, always “next”, always forward.
Vector time and sediment time.
Great or intimate history is preserved as long as it is observed. Memory stores and organizes temporal data.
With this series of works, I focused on the radiation of the present. A present that cannot be observed in motion but only when we become indulgent with the banality of the passage of time. From dawn to dusk, nothing more laconic and, at the same time, more oppressive.
My only power over the passage is my gaze. I “sat down” with the privilege of seeing, aiming with my eyes and then fixing the subtle changes with my mind. Those changes mean, pragmatically and unequivocally, our passing.
Time/period are themes that I have leaned on insistently in the last 4 years, making several series of works where the visualization of a sequence is the red thread in my artistic practice.
When I experienced the pandemic lockdown episode, I understood concretely what was always obvious, the fact that we can stay locked up forever in our own limits/delimitations, but the seasons will still pass, and for me, the only way to feel their passing is the way our light, color, nature and skin change with this passage.
My painting captures the gentle yet impassive dimension of the passage.
I have associated this transition with hydrochloric effects, strong, hard, corrosive effects, but the title of the exhibition leans rather towards the lightness of the chlorine element and its slow but penetrating aggression, which irreversibly marks the areas it touches. Allow me this literary but equally accurate analogy.
This art project is a huge sight. A tense focus on the boundary between two measures of time.”
Anca Bodea
