The present as a misunderstanding – expoziţie Nicu Ilfoveanu în Polonia

Wozownia Gallery   – Toruń

19.04.2013 – 2.05.2013

The emergence of Central Europe in the eyes of the West is – according to Andrzej Turowski – identifying the Alien. For the western viewer, the photographs taken by a Romanian author may still seem a bit exotic, since they depict the spatio-temporal peripheries of the world defined via the dichotomy center/margin, metropolis/province. While for the viewers coming from Central and Eastern Europe as well as for Ilfoveanu himself, it is not an encounter with “the real Alien” or “the real Other”, rather, referring to the terminology proposed by Boris Groys, with “the not-completely-Other” or “the close Other”, which in turn initiates the gaze filled with nostalgia, yet one void of exoticization.
Therefore, the paradox of Ilfoveanu's photography rests within the tension between being close and keeping distance, being at home and observing the Other, which becomes apparent, among others, in the framing of particular photographs, belonging to a single cycle, but presenting the chosen motifs once in intense close-up, while elsewhere from above and from distance. Thus, one might risk a thesis that, for the artist, Romania with its inhabitants and architecture seems to be a kind of “a close Other” who is in part familiar, but also to some extent alien. The Romanian vagabond Ilfoveanu – despite all the differences separating him from the Benjaminian, dandy-like flâneur – like the flâneur frequently remains at the threshold, observing and capturing the individual shots, simultaneously maintaining distance and restraint. On the other hand, the emotional engagement signalizes an almost-programmatic attachment to – what may seem at first as – non-photogenic motifs, which constantly reappear, intensifying the feeling of melancholy, also on the side of the recipient. In these photographs, one can sense a kind of an intriguing crack, resulting from a fusion of something “natural”, direct, photographed as if spontaneously and spotted by chance on one's way, with something conventional, distant and mediated, or even as if stylized – in a positive way.

(Marta Smolinska, "Remarks on the anachronism of Nicu Ilfoveanu's work", excerpt - catalogue text)

Curator: Marta Smolińska