Andrei Budescu x Obscura, review by Iulia Iacob, 2nd year, ITA

 

Between the 20th of April and the 24th of May 2021, The Center of Interest (Centrul de Interes) in Cluj-Napoca hosted a large event that consisted in multiple exhibitions taking place in different ’rooms’ of the same floor. This brought together and simultaneously confronted multiple aesthetic experiences by the sheer existence of these exhibitions in a mutual location, despite not being unified by a singular concept or title. However, the exhibition reviewed here is Andrei Budescu’s Obscura that was set up in the FOCUS Project Space.

Andrei Budescu (b. 1982) is a photographer and currently the Head of the Photo-Video Department at the University of Art and Design from Cluj-Napoca. His work is deeply rooted within the history of photography itself, with its many experiments with multiple photographic processes (Polaroid, Wet Plate Collodion, Cyanotype etc.) and many cameras. This adds to his works a dimension of self-awareness, an emphasis on the process of creating and materializing an image into a visual form. This approach develops into a fascinating space of dialogue between concept and mediality (a term coined by art historian Hans Belting in his book ’An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body’), exploring the medium as a physical presence of the image. This also brings forth a powerful idea that the (artistic) object looks back at us and simultaneously embodies our gaze, just as any animated presence does.  

  Is photography a moment of absolute seeing or, actually, the visible expression of an undertaken blindness? Do we write our own realities with our arbitrary gaze, trimming and selecting bits of reality that articulate themselves in our stories? In the exhibition Obscura, Andrei Budescu explores the tension between visible and invisible, the duality of the gaze reacting to the world and the world reacting back to the gaze, in a movement that consolidates both their natures. Inspired by theories of quantum physics that propose the idea that some phenomena are canceled by our mere surveillance (and expectancy) of them, the artists rely for this exhibition mainly on the Wet Collodion process for capturing a sensitive territory of thought in a photographic process of the 19th century that is permeated with a sense of ephemerality, fragility.

It's about things that don't happen simply because they are being watched; about the eye (and, extrapolating, the lens) that flattens events by scrutinizing them. He decomposes the process of looking at the world in multiple processes and his works end up lingering between being the representation of our own eyes and the representation of the world as it unfolds to the eye.

Using the process of Wet Collodion in capturing certain large images such as landscapes that are then transferred onto a computer, cropped, processed, and then printed on different types of photographic paper in a circular shape, Andrei Budescu marks this exhibition’s space with a suspended work right at the entrance, printed on a semi-transparent paper. This work already introduces, with the work of printed on a see-through medium, the exploration of the ’layers of seeing’ the world. The image being circular, it powerfully suggests the idea of the eye, the lens, and the world all at once. As we enter, the display of the works of art in this all-white space makes us feel as we stepped into a studio a bit after the artist had finished printing his photographs, as if he had just stepped out himself just a couple of minutes ago. Prints are laid on clothing racks and other similar stands as if the color was still drying.) On the floor, however, we find a square blackboard with nothing on it but a transparent globe that would fit right into our palms: I surprised myself visualizing the globe in Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi and thinking – this is the world gravitating over darkness. The transparency of the globe displayed on a dark material seemed like the two extremes that illustrate the way we see the world – within the see-through glass of the globe (that I would also associate with the globe of the eye), the other works are reflected, but then again, they also collapse in a sort of unshakable darkness of the matter, as if the eyes of the world were shut.

This sense of being simultaneously in a space of creation and in a conceptual realm makes the works look like both abstract and figurative ones. The play of light and shadow, shapes and the cropped images that merely evoke the world and not re-present it raise a question of what our eyes actually contribute to the building of reality itself. Do all of these mechanisms of seeing happen just because we are looking or not looking at certain things? A work displayed on a rack is certainly an image of tree branches – but the way that the image is cropped and enlarged, the processing of the colors, and the sheer association of this figurative work with the others make us realize that the more we look at it, the more abstract it becomes. We question ourselves. This proves an immense skill of manipulating surfaces and contents for the sake of immersing the viewer in the artist’s world. Observing the physical world in itself becomes, in this exhibition, an exercise of both seeing and not seeing becomes a tremendously powerful aesthetic and analytical experience.

At the end of the day, the artist’s key point in this exhibition is not offering answers or exemplifying certain physical mechanisms of seeing, but rather pulling us away from our regular way of looking into an insightful space of being confronted with our own gaze. The exhibition is both so simple, clean and so conceptually and visually compelling that it can leave no viewer untouched by the experience of feeling like he actually looks at, and not just sees the world, for the first time. Andrei Budescu is sure to not just impress, but create significant insight through all of his works so far.