At the beginning of May, Relicvar Gallery in Cluj-Napoca opened the exhibition “The Encompassing Gaze, the Penetrating Gaze/ Privirea cuprindere, privirea străpungere”, which brings together the perspectives of thirteen artists: Robert Fekete, Lucian Popăilă, Norbert Filep, Bogdan Szekely, Ioan Popdan, Mircea But, Cantemir Hauși, Bogdan Vlăduță, Andrei Ispas, Vasile Istrate, Dan Isăilă, Mihai Ciplea and David Farcaș.

“Before anything else, making art involves an effort of attention. The refinement, intensity and persistence of that effort are, in fact, the first factors that qualitatively differentiate works of art from each other. A refined and consciously educated attention, persistently oriented towards the visual object of artistic interest (which the craft then transfigures, in the process of concretely building the work of art, in various stylistic manners and working environments, from one artist to another) and an assumed intensity of this observational attention (without this meaning that this effort necessarily produces descriptive, purely mimetic works) are the common elements that characterize the art of the thirteen artists in the exhibition “The Comprehension Gaze, the Penetrating Gaze” at the Relicvar Gallery: Robert Fekete, Lucian Popăilă, Norbert Filep, Bogdan Szekely, Ioan Popdan, Mircea But, Cantemir Hauși, Bogdan Vlăduță, Andrei Ispas, Vasile Istrate, Dan Isăilă and Mihai Ciplea, David Farcas.

More than an act of perception, attention is a decision of orientation, an option – spatial, emotional, cognitive, metaphysical – that is rooted and at the same time roots and is inevitably guided by more or less conscious values. No less than the very process of artistic transformation of the visible image from which the work of art starts, sustained attention is transfiguring in itself or preparing for transfiguration, as anyone who has fixed their gaze for a long time on even the most insignificant object can testify. Some of the artists in “The Comprehension Gaze, the Penetrating Gaze” tend to focus their attention on the banal, which is transfigured each time by the collaboration of a specific element with the artist’s technical effort.”
Bogdan Iacob