Artists: mountaincutters
Exhibition title: landscape of objects becoming an eye
Curated by: Cristina Vasilescu
Venue: Suprainfinit, Bucharest, Romania
Date: May 18 – June 18, 2022
Photography: New Folder Studio / Mihaela Vezentan, all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Suprainfinit, Bucharest
A sense of hazard, fragility, archival and organic stems in the exhibition space. As an apparent feeling of disorder hovers around, a specific level of comfort is yet permeated. The multitude of objects, half-objects, prosthesis, familiar and unfamiliar things are carefully placed on the terrazzo floor of the gallery. They balance themselves and echo each other in the liquid working process of the artists. Not only is there movement and rhythm in almost every object, but also in the space created in-between and in the landscape that slowly surfaces out. Every now and then found images are juxtaposed onto soft and hard materials, under a glass stone or under transparent sheets of recycled plastic foil, pierced in an old wooden hat maker-support. Traces of hybrid archeological figurines seem to underline a narrative that only the viewer can articulate and continue it further along.
The artist duo tackles the idea of absence through the encounters between contrasting materials and their consequent relationships of dissonance and consonance. Their abstract and arte povera vocabulary questions the nature–technology binomial through a series of hybrid concepts situated between geology, landscape, and gesture. mountaincutters’ approach to objects, materials and their overgrowing site-specific installations dissolves the current object–capital logic. In a way, the artworks become tools for other personal histories to unravel, territories to unbound, and bodies to become vulnerable. The hierarchies of perception find themselves rearranged. While the development of industrial societies forged an able-bodied system and increased productivity as a way of valuing the body, the artists rather convert it into a vulnerable and imperfect entity.
Ovoid, crashed, frail, with crevices and earthy colours, the artworks depict in fact some midcentury industrial lamps. Materialities and ideas collide, as much as socio-political actions do. Through using scientific images and borrowing medical and technological visual languages at times, it is underlain the potential body and animated object against “the bifurcation of nature and culture, and the subsequent purification of each domain (by way of objectification)” which makes moderns “see double”, as Bruno Latour asserts.
Employing hybrid attitudes and forms, mountaincutters contaminate the spaces they exhibit in and germinate meanings and material compositions, as well as doubt. Their installations open up portals for the past and future to swirl together, inviting the viewers to continue the artistic process of alteration and transformation of the objects, materials, and their corporeal dimension.
landscape of objects becoming an eye is mountaincutter’s first solo exhibition at Suprainfinit gallery and pulls together fragments from the work series: les indices de la respiration primitive (2021); anatomie d’un corps absent (2019); ctrl c respiration (2022); etudes of cycladiques (2022).
-Curatorial text: Cristina Vasilescu
The exhibition is supported by IFRo (Institutul Francez din Romania) and Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles.
mountaincutters, landscape of objects becoming an eye, 2022, exhibition view, Suprainfinit gallery, Bucharest
mountaincutters, landscape of objects becoming an eye, 2022, exhibition view, Suprainfinit gallery, Bucharest
mountaincutters, landscape of objects becoming an eye, 2022, exhibition view, Suprainfinit gallery, Bucharest
mountaincutters, landscape of objects becoming an eye, 2022, exhibition view, Suprainfinit gallery, Bucharest
mountaincutters, landscape of objects becoming an eye, 2022, exhibition view, Suprainfinit gallery, Bucharest
mountaincutters, landscape of objects becoming an eye, 2022, exhibition view, Suprainfinit gallery, Bucharest
mountaincutters, landscape of objects becoming an eye, 2022, exhibition view, Suprainfinit gallery, Bucharest
mountaincutters, landscape of objects becoming an eye, 2022, exhibition view, Suprainfinit gallery, Bucharest
mountaincutters, landscape of objects becoming an eye, 2022, exhibition view, Suprainfinit gallery, Bucharest
mountaincutters, landscape of objects becoming an eye, 2022, ceramic, wood, glass, copper, 55x50x45cm
mountaincutters, Objet-Incomplet (les indices de la respiration primitive), 2021, wood, copper, chalk, medicinal iconography, magnets, 30x20x25cm
mountaincutters, Objet-Horizons, 2022, steel, ceramic, copper, wood, 55x50x45cm
mountaincutters, Incomplete Venus, 2022, blown-glass, brass, 205x85x75cm
mountaincutters, Incomplete Venus, detail, 2022, blown-glass, brass, 205x85x75cm
mountaincutters, Etudes Cycladiques, 2022, wood, blown-glass, recycled plastic tarp, medical iconography, paper, copper, 30x40x5cm
mountaincutters, Etudes Cycladiques, 2022, wood, recycled plastic tarp, medical & Cycladic iconography, paper, copper, 31×42×3cm
mountaincutters, Etudes Cycladiques, 2022, wood, blown-glass, recycled plastic tarp, medical & Cycladic, iconography, paper, copper, 25x30x5cm
mountaincutters, Etudes Cycladiques, 2022, wood, blown-glass, recycled plastic tarp, Cycladic iconography, paper, copper, 30×25×5cm
mountaincutters, Objet-Horizons, 2022, Steel, glass, recycled plastic bag, kapok, ceramic, 38×50×35cm
mountaincutters, Objet-Incomplet (les morceaux de paysages enrayent l’appareil corps), 2020, ceramic, steel, 50×40×40cm