Indecis Artist Run Space from Timisoara presents on Saturday, April 8, from 6:00 p.m., the group exhibition Threat to The Eye, curated by Ada Muntean.

The event brings together the artistic discourses of eight visual creators who approach a variety of traditional and experimental mediums, exploring antithetical notions, which are not mutually exclusive: comfortable/uncomfortable, beautiful/repulsive, open/closed, interior/exterior, predictable/unpredictable.

The exhibition Threat to The Eye starts from the statement of the artist Barbara Kruger in the video “Barbara Kruger: in her own words”, in which she states that her works represent a “threat to the eye”, having the effect of changing how we perceive an artistic object.

I think I have done a number of works which represent a threat to the eye. One of the reasons they’re powerful and effective is that they present a danger to our relationship to the seen world. I think that in a culture based on imagery and the collision of looking and being, the collision of narcissism and voyeurism, the eye is the major player. So, a threat to that eye is a threat to what it means to live another day.]

“Extrapolating the meaning that Barbara Kruger attributes to her artistic approach, contemporary art as a phenomenon can be seen as a ‘threat to the eye’, from the perspective of being unpredictable and ‘unfriendly’ to the viewer: it is not necessarily just painting, not it is necessarily beautiful and not predictably displayed on a wall. But it can be all these together and still become a perceptive “threat” through the subversiveness with which it can convey a message antithetical to the beautiful image that supports it”, says Ada Muntean, curator of the exhibition.

At the same time, the Threat to The Eye project refers to the premonitory work of the artist Victor Brauner, Self-Portrait with a Wounded Eye, painted in 1931. Seven years later, in the summer of 1938, the artist, permanently settled in Paris, loses his left eye trying to stop a dispute between the painters Oscar Dominguez and Esteban Frances.

In Self-portrait with a Wounded Eye, the artist introduced into his work the “creative principle of dissimilarity”, which signifies the rejection of a mimetic art and at the same time the transfiguration of the external image (the mirror image) into a “revelation of the interior” – in the case of the self-portrait, a premonitory image. For Victor Brauner, the evisceration of the eye, considered “the central pivot of his evolution”, was ultimately a liberation, a necessary sacrifice for the fulfillment of creation, and, at the same time, a new opening towards a very particular pictorial vision.*

Artists: Mathias Bar, Anca Bodea, Taisia ​​Corbut, Teodora Cosman, Felix Deac, Ana Maria Micu, Ada Muntean and Răzvan Neagoe.

The exhibition can be visited until May 7, 2023. Admission is free.

*PETROV, Mihaela, Victor Brauner – The painter’s eye. The accident in the summer of 1938, Dilema Veche, no. 850 from 23 – 29 July 2020