Stillness
I've always had a fascination with the transformation that the landscape, as we commonly know it, undergoes during winter.
These observations on both the earthy and the celestial are the result of a deeper contemplation on the vastness of space, an understanding enhanced by a state of stillness and immersion into an unknown and mysterious world, that hints to an infinity beyond one's physical existence.
By removing the distractions that normally clutter the landscape, the trace of man-made elements and preference for abstraction and simplicity of form, I aim to capture the core of the landscape, to unite metaphysical dualities including earth and sky, light and dark, mind and body.
My aesthetic choice in Stillness is aimed at conveying a sense of harmony of one’s existence on both the universal and microcosmic scale, and and to provide an experience that ultimately transcends the boundaries of the purely aesthetic.
Present Continuous
This work explores the possibility of a temporally extended present, a refuse to embrace liminality.
While I don't necessarily understand photographs as static preservations of a moment, their ultimate power resides in their capacity to suppress the present and create memories of their own. The desire to memorialize fleeting impressions is rooted in the acknowledgement of the transiency of childhood and physical world.
I wanted to suspend the present by capturing present moments in an archetypal space where the temporal distinction between past, present and future is blurred.
In this space, the awareness of passage of time stems from reflecting on our memories of what has happened. But as the act of recording the present on camera unfolds, comes the apprehension that the perceived present is already past.
Dark matter
An attempt to justify my creative process in making this work through a statement of intent would be half-prone to failure. Perhaps I was drawn to the mutability of water. One water is not like another. Or it was the preoccupation with the invisible under the visible.
In the black water I could see the opening of an abyss. Without light and colour, it turned into a mass of dark viscous fluid.
I looked at it until I didn't know what I was looking at, where I was or what I was. Disorientation. Void. Timelessness.
It could be the darkness that lies within each of us.
Early Days
This project represents an excursion in the past, a dialogue with my personal history. Having very few images from my childhood, my photographic quest has grown from the gaps in the representation of this time of my life. A longing for memorialisation, materialised post factum, led to my attempt to create a personal archive that never existed.
Every summer I go back to Iasi, north of Romania, the city where I grew up. It feels like a journey back in time. I wander around the neighbourhood where I used to live, a working class district named after the Moldavian emperor Alexandru cel Bun. Long standing legacy of the communist era, the apartment buildings make a labyrinth, where grass and trees grow wildly between the cracked concrete and on the unpaved ground around the buildings. Other people moved in the apartment that once belonged to my family, other kids are playing in those alleys in the shadow of mulberry and acacia trees, just as I did.
The summers came and went, friendships were made and broken. The concrete city slowly revealed itself to me; it took many years of exploring it. It is also this place with its harshness and its softness that formed me and gave me a certain way of looking at things. From under the acacia trees of my childhood I’ve never dreamt I’d see the world beyond it.
The story of my city is about the resilience of man and nature.
