Artist: Daniel Moldoveanu
Exhibition title: The Whatever Moment
Venue: SABOT, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
Date: December 14, 2022 – February 25, 2023
Photography: YAP Studio – Pavel Curagău & Mădălin Mărgăritescu / all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and SABOT, Cluj-Napoca
Note: Exhibition’s text is available here
It is when inconsequentiality becomes inconsequential that language is lost. Time becomes whatever-moment — the moment as neither this or that moment, but as the momentary as such, the unqualified course of things towards nothingness. And the whatever-moment is silent. This silence is not the silence of nature, where every moment is over-consequential to the point of silence. Rather, it is the silence of compound inconsenquentiality, when inconsequentiality becomes inconsequential. To live in the present moment, in the purely momentary, this then is to live in nothing. If I live in this nothing, perhaps I will then say it — nothing matters. But as I take to speech and exclaim: nothing matters, it is that this inconsequentiality overtakes me as infinitely consequential. As I say: nothing matters, an immediate insight is brought to light, the insight that I am really saying: this nothing matters. If I say: nothing matters, it matters to me that nothing matters. This nothing annihilates nothingness, and, at once, it matters. What matters now is this insight, the insight into the difference between nothing matters and this nothing matters. This difference is what matters — infinitely so.
Flickering alternates between the depthless and the performative, showing the internal nothing of the present moment, of whatever-moment — what Wallace Stevens named the stale grandeur of annihilation. What it forces upon us is a return. In whatever-moment, we are extended into the givenness of things, dispersed into objects, falling into nothingness, an Absolute Fall — and so this art must turn us from our downward procession, and back to ourselves. The unity of this procession and this return, is contemplation. But this contemplation is an action, it is the action through which we are in this moment, not in whatever-moment, nor as living in the moment, but in this moment which is nothing but that which matters. (Ulysse Carrière-Bouchard, Venice, 2022)
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Daniel Moldoveanu (*1999 in Constanța, Romania; lives and works in Berlin, Germany) is an artist and essayist. His practice encompasses painting, video, photography, mixed media and text. Upon graduating from the Vienna Institute of Fashion, Moldoveanu enrolled at the Humboldt University and the University of Fine Arts, Berlin, studying Cultural Studies, Art History, and Fine Art. “The Whatever Moment” is the artist’s first exhibition with SABOT.
