Borderline Art Space hosts, on Friday, January 19, starting at 6 p.m., the opening of the photography exhibition by the artist Leonard Alecu, curated by Erwin Kessler.
Curatorial argument:
“Leonard Alecu has dedicated the last 12 years to the meticulous and persistent pursuit of a single subject – the North. He is a lover of the landscape, the opposite of that mioritic, green, eternal, which we have in mind when we refer to the notion of landscape. For Alecu, the ideal landscape is abstract, black and white, almost empty, without color and obvious picturesqueness. It is the landscape of temporary landforms created by states of aggregation of water, from liquid to steam, fog, snow and ice. There are no people, figures or beings in his photographs. A frequent guest at the border of the Arctic Circle, in Greenland and Iceland, in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2018, 2019, 2022, and 2023, Leonard Alecu has nothing of those explorers who want to reach and surpass human physical performance. There is nothing sporty about it. It is not the attraction of the Pole that brings him to the North, like the explorers, but the attraction of whiteness and emptiness, for the North is a limited case, exemplary, of naturally given black and white. Follower of the school of Edward Weston, Leonard Alecu sees in black and white to see better, more deeply – the landscape, the world, life, greatness, and disappearance. What he is aiming at has nothing to do with the material resistance of the human but with the human resistance to immateriality. His approach is spiritual.
NORD 04 at Borderline Art Space in Iași presents a selection of iconic photographs of very large sizes, printed by Leonard Alecu, with equipment and processes developed by him, on special Hahnemühle paper. The photographs come from his expeditions to Iceland and Greenland: massive glaciers or glacial lakes, frozen waterfalls, the raw ocean on which icebergs float smaller and smaller under the watchful, compassionate but relentless eye of the photographer, bewildering evaporations, beguiling seeps, eternal or very fresh ice, under which the water squints, transparent as a mirror. A cold world in an often sumptuous but frequently fatal movement. Risk and danger are always attached to the camera lens but also to the eye of the beholder – and that’s because Leonard Alecu has never used the drone to safely approach the enormous blocks of ice that can collapse at any moment and swallow with them the imprecise observer, avid for whiteness and emptiness, who advances at any risk towards the almost imperceptible fact of disappearance and waits for days on end with the bulky and difficult large-format camera (8×20 inches), to capture on film that unique moment when the composition of temporary relief forms reveal the timeless ideality of statements about the world, about perfection and infinity, about life and destruction, about human and divine.”
The photography exhibition NORD 04 can be visited until February 25, 2024.
