Interval X is an installation composed of
three parts:
1. a body made of a circular part, a parallelepiped in its middle, that finishes
with a glass aquarium, in which a plaster head floats in a blue and bubbling
liquid; the circular part is made of metal alternating with glass, through
which neon light is spread; also a light is projected to the head from the
underneath;
2. more hand-made tubes, with neon at the interior;
3. a sound, resembling the sound of a drowning object.
In this form, the work was exhibited at the "2Meta" gallery in Bucharest,
in April 2003, as part of the gallery's project "one curator - one artist
- one work".
In the white, but small space of the gallery, the work looked rather artificially,
and it created a claustrophobic effect. This was, in fact, its main purpose:
to create a strange effect upon the viewer, to get this one out of his usual
state of mind. As I tried to define it, it was a kind of gap between the "outside"
space and the "inside" of the gallery: an interval.
The X element would probably be me, and the head in the aquarium could be
looked at as a self-portrait.
The work became clearer to me and lost its artificial character when I had
to exhibit it a second time, for the graduation exam.
Then I had to rethink firstly its display, for a totally different space,
and secondly to find its conceptual similarities with painting, in order to
justify it as a graduation project from a rather conservative Faculty of Painting.
If at the 2Meta gallery Interval X resembled
more a lift off platform and it was quite
a-temporal and out of a precise context, at the Dalles gallery (where the
graduating exhibition of my year took place), it became revelatory for my
condition at the end of 5 years of studying painting. The distance between
the 2 main elements of the work became a separation almost visually unbearable
and the sound lost its unifying power.
My other self, the projected "alien", was trapped in its rigid carcasse,
representing, to my eyes, all the constraints I felt during my studies; the
"illuminated" and "illuminating" tubes, with the same
poetic consistency as the first time, clearly showed their visionary meaning:
if the first time they were intersecting, somewhere up there, here they were,
with no doubt, parallel and they were like the future I was looking at: strange,
uncertain and intriguing.
