PALIMPSEST is the second group exhibition organized by Himera Contemporary Art Gallery in the ISHO exhibition space in Timișoara.
The exhibition, curated by Norbert Filep, brings together the artistic discourses of five emerging artists: Mihaela Coandă, Iulia Pușcașu, Kit Szász, Daniel Semenciuc and Codruț Zele.
“To accumulate through erasure or to erase through accumulation constitutes two actions whose roots seem to hide the same original nature of the palimpsest.
The first action subtly describes a necessity, a need to store information, the moment, that vital NOW that can no longer be postponed. History self-sacrifices, new information replaces the old, and when it becomes outdated, the renewal repeats with the same freshness as the first time. History transforms into a barely perceptible ghost, yielding its spotlight to the present.
The second action alters the objectivity of information into abstract subjectivity. The “void” produced by erasure is due, paradoxically, to that excess, that accumulation that refuses to leave the playground, gradually abstracting into a relic, falling prey either to the subjectivity of the hurried viewer or to the expert spectator, the archaeologist skilled in visual deciphering. Thus, tension arises between abstracted, erased, faded history and the newly created informational form, which represents the visual and conceptual logic of the palimpsest.
In the current exhibition, this logic materializes in a new generation of artists who, through their practice, relate to the recent or distant history of art. The generational constancy through which a continuous flow of contemporary art, or, as it is now called, “super-contemporary” art, is produced seems to be unstable, amplifying the palimpsest-like space of art. Thus, the fragment extracted from this “historical document” for the show contains the names of five emerging artists: Mihaela Coandă, Iulia Pușcașu, Kit Szász, Daniel Semenciuc, and Codruț Zele.
In the show, we find two territories that dominate the contemporary art scene and form an antagonistic duality within this palimpsest-like space.
A register of neo-conceptualism, operating through a variety of media, defines a significant part of the exhibition ensemble. Whether we speak of Iulia Pușcașu’s works, which engage with the interferences between philosophical, virtual, or even digital concepts and methods, thus questioning the boundary between the real and the digital, or Kit Szász’s practice, characterized by interdisciplinarity, from drawings that record the passage of time to the hostility of objects belonging to urban design, these approaches contain strategies that define the territory of new conceptualism.
In a contrasting act, the territory of painting, with its centuries-old history and tradition, marks its presence in the exhibition with oil on canvas works by Mihaela Coandă, Daniel Semenciuc and Codruț Zele. At first glance, these works seem to pull in different directions, but upon closer inspection, a common thread, a strangeness through which the artists recharge the space of contemporary painting with romantic tendencies, becomes visible.
By introducing amorphous elements that hint at surrealism, Mihaela Coandă articulates spaces that once belonged to a Morandi or de Chirico. Daniel Semenciuc encapsulates photography through painting. The ghostly trace of photographs is preserved in the subtle tremor of gray strokes, making their memory vibrate on the viewer’s retina. Codruț Zele, on the other hand, “attacks” the viewer’s retina through chiaroscuro. This “attack” proves to be a gentle one, aiming to slowly awaken the viewer from historical reverie through a baroque-expressionist melange in which we encounter classical subjects such as fire, cockfights, or cats.”
Norbert Filep
