Dan Voinea, "Blindscape: There from Where Nothing Can Be Seen"

Slag Gallery is pleased to present in the main gallery Blindscape: There from Where Nothing Can Be Seen, a new series of works by Dan Voinea. In this body of work, Voinea addresses photophobia as an allegory of a crisis of the sight - as confusion syndrome: inability to focus a reality. The sight no longer has a point of support. The world has become an informal and confusing magma of suggestions, impressions, concepts, and sensations. Photophobia also alludes to the runaway from visibility and to the anxiety resented in contact with a disturbing, discordant, atonal and inconsistent reality, in which man no longer finds a vital center.

Dan Voinea paints invisible spaces and a state of existential baffling. It refers to the condition of the contemporary man, in permanent transition between various realities and media, captive without a goal in a progressively relative, volatile world, which lacks a primordial nature. The Simulacra, according to Baudrillard, replaces all the layers and sublayers of the world; we live in conceptual fields, and the representation successfully blocks almost all the access paths to what was once called "being" and what was called "world." They supported each other through a mutual epic that merged fiction with biography, yet that has vanished nowadays.

Voinea's characters are touched by sleepwalking. They are and are not present; they are disconnected from the space in which they appear. The style evokes the contours, the morphology and the dynamics of palpable reality and the impressionistic dissolutions of the image - which seems to break into emptiness - relate to the ambiguity of purely mental representations whose vision is blurry, diffused, interrupted by shadows. The protagonists in Voinea's works are captive in an objectless narrative, frozen in the void. Their identity is as imprecise as the connection with the vague space in which they are placed. They have strange, sleepy appearances and seem to be touched by a state of consciousness' blindness. Seemingly depersonalized, they float themselves in virtuality. The rupture between consciousness and the environment - exposed elliptically and in a chromaticity suggesting noise and disorder - shows the confusing and problematic connection the contemporary man has with a world that is becoming more and more prolix and inconsistent. Face expressions allude to Robert Musil's "Man without Qualities," a man whose identity is exposed to a continuous erosion process. "Is not the only spiritual deficiency that the spirit is spiritless?" Musil asks.