The exhibition “This Will Feel Like a Strange and Warm Embrace”, a female duo show proposed by The H Gallery, presents over 20 recent works by the artists Codruța Cernea and Roberta Curcă.

“In the exhibition “This Will Feel Like a Strange and Warm Embrace”, the artists intuit from the beginning this “gestalt” mechanism that takes into account personal perceptions and experiences in their total indivisibility and uniqueness, while addressing everyone, universally. In this sense, the title has a more complex role than that of imposing a general state.
No matter how many people you ask to describe a hug, you will never get enough separate information to reconfigure it unless you have already had similar experiences. Intuition helps mediate the distance between the tendency toward piecemeal categorization and perception as a distinct whole. Of course, we can intuit the general idea behind a hug, based on previous perceptions, but this fact causes an automatic and involuntary transposition of already-known characteristics to the newly created imaginary pose.
Thus, although the title is formulated in a calm and soothing note, intuiting a general form of pleasure, the effect produced has deep echoes, to the most intimate recesses of the self. The strangeness of this way of relating to the world can seem suffocating and futile, but awareness of these details can be a first step towards understanding each other more deeply.

The collaboration between Codruța Cernea and Roberta Curcă is formed on this basis given by an elaborate introspective process, carried out with consideration towards an extended subjectivity, passing through itself, outwards. A first indication of the common direction within the exhibition This Will Feel Like a Strange and Warm Embrace can be found on a formal level, through the materials used.
Understood as a universal element, indispensable in everyday life, the paper represents the core of the exhibition precisely because it manages to project the intimate and vulnerable nature of creation. What could be more personal than finding old notes on paper? What could be more honest than drawing a disinterested mark, without ulterior motives, on paper? Although we know very well that all this is to be lost between the pages never to be seen again, we continue to leave a lot of little hints of our existence, releasing them at will, like messages in a bottle, to ourselves and, then to no one.
Whether it is a diary or random lists with a practical role, the paper offers refuge precisely because it is there to contain, affirm and give meaning without demanding anything in return – things vital to us beings permanently overwhelmed by the baggage of their perceptions.” – excerpt from the presentation text of the exhibition written by Tea Vindt

The exhibition can be visited until May 10, 2023. Admission is free.

Codruța CERNEA (b. 1979, Târgu-Mureș) uses painting as an ideal tool to practice possibilities and to reveal hidden aspects of her existence. Her works often capture private moments with a meditative atmosphere, reflecting the subterranean sense of loneliness increasingly present in the contemporary human experience.
The posture of an observer, nostalgic scenarios about the future, individual experience as a subtle mirror of collective transformations, the landscape, and human nature with its contradictory emotional needs are some of the themes explored by the artist in her pictorial universe, in constant change.
In 2010, she graduated from the university master’s courses of the Painting department, within the National University of Arts in Bucharest.
Her works have been exhibited in numerous group and personal exhibitions, including Future Nostalgia (2019) and Paradise of Lost Desires (2021) at the Mobius Gallery in Bucharest. In 2021, An Invincible Summer appeared, the artist’s first catalog, and in the same year, she received the Dă-te Mare award! from the Museum of Recent Art in Bucharest.

Roberta CURCĂ (b. 1991) studied at the National University of Arts in Bucharest, majoring in Graphics, and is currently doing a doctorate in cultural studies at CESI – Center for Excellence in Image Studies.
Her artistic discourse traces the dynamics between two and three-dimensional, order and chance, intention and impact, and human and non-human. The artist investigates man’s relationship with built space or with nature, as well as the psychological, social, political, or ecological implications of this relationship through drawing, photography, objects, and artist books.
She exhibited at Zina Gallery (personal exhibition) and MATCA art space in Cluj-Napoca, Accademia di Romania in Rome, Galeria Ivan (personal exhibition) and Atelier 35 in Bucharest, Indecis artist-run space and Kunsthalle Bega in Timișoara, as well as in Beta – Timisoara Architecture Biennale 2022.

Source cover photo: thehgallery.com