Gaep presents Răzvan Anton: Fading Studies, an exhibition of new works rooted in a family collection of images: 8mm footage shot mostly by the artist’s father during the 1970s and 1980s. This material prompts both a significant body of new sun prints and a two-channel video, Archival Study (Places and Portraits), that will be featured in the exhibition. This is the artist’s third solo show with Gaep. The opening will take place on Friday, February 28, starting at 18:00, at the Gaep Gallery.
“After having worked for several years with public archives such as the Minerva Press Photo Archive, Răzvan Anton began in 2022 to look at his family’s collection. The works in the exhibition exemplify this change in his practice. Nonetheless, he continues to use a heliographic technique in order to, somewhat paradoxically, excavate a hidden meaning from the surface of old images. Anton starts by hatching perforated paper sheets with a blue ball pen, then places a transparent screen with the negative of the found image on them. Finally, he puts the layered sheets on the windows of his studio and lets the sun print the image through a slow process that takes weeks or months, depending on the season.
Originating from the same family collection, the video Archival Study (Places and Portraits) loops digitized and edited 8mm footage. Anton treated this private material in a similar fashion to the public archive he had worked with before. Just like an archivist who classifies and labels, he organized sequences from his father’s footage into two categories: places and portraits. Still, he lets these categories overlap and feature in both videos. “The landscapes, gardens, homes, faces, bodies belong to the same muddled, disorganized, convoluted lived reality. In front of this work, the eye and mind can wander off, seduced by the softness and intimacy of old footage.” Mihaela Chiriac, curator
Răzvan Anton (b. 1980, lives and works in Cluj-Napoca) received a MA degree in drawing from Camberwell College of Arts London, following a MA at the University of Art and Design in Cluj-Napoca. His work has been included in exhibitions at MGML – Match Gallery (Ljubljana, 2021), Motorenhalle/riesa efau (Dresden, 2019), Politecnico di Milano – Galleria del Progetto (Milan, 2019) and in the biennials 15th Bienal de la Habana (Havana, 2024) and Art Encounters (Timișoara, 2017), among other places. Before Fading Studies (2025), Gaep presented two of his solo exhibitions: Studies of Gaze (2020) and Mnemonics (2015). Anton was artist-in-residence at MuseumsQuartier in Vienna and at The House by the Synagogue, Mediaș, as part of the project Absence as Heritage/TRACES.
The exhibition can be visited until April 12, 2025.
