The City Vanishes

‘The City Vanishes’ is a solo art show organised by Annart Gallery in Bucharest, Romania, in 2022. All the work presented - ink drawings and a VR hologram, were made especially for this occasion and are meant to express my ambivalent relationship with the architecture of Bucharest and the comical, tragical and (often) absurd stories behind it.

‘Berzei’ (2022), ink drawing collage is a little homage to a group of houses that were demolished around 2009 in order to enlarge Berzei Street in Bucharest. Some of them were pretty shabby. Others were just in need of some repair work to restore their former beauty, which obviously never happened. There was nothing I could do to save them, but I gave them a tiny place in the realm of art.

The miniature drawings in the ‘Fragment’ series show the incredible mix of objects, styles and textures one can encounter during a walk around the old streets of Bucharest.

'The City Vanishes' is ultimately a project that recuperates and gives tangible from to absence.

The drawing and holography installation ‘Marna’ (2022) was inspired by a building that I passed hundreds of times when I was living in Bucharest, which hosted a cinema, first known as Marna, then as ‘Cinema Feroviarul’. I only ever saw it as a ruin, with no roof, no windows, just two adjoining walls, with trees growing inside among piles of rubbish - a ghost of what used to be a beautiful 19th century building with fantastic ornaments still visible on its façade around 2009. I kept hoping that somehow a miracle would happen and it would be restored to its former shape and glory. Instead, the more predictable scenario materialised and it was demolished along with many other houses in the neighbourhood.
My hologram embodies this building in two stages of its life - as it looked before the roof and windows collapsed due to a fire, and as the ruin that it became afterwards. Behind it on the wall is one of the largest drawings I have made to date, of the new office building that was erected in its place. A reconciliation of past and present which sometimes only seems to be possible in the imagination or in the realm of art. I am glad, however, that I was able to use the medium of holography to bring back to life that which no longer is, while at the same time expressing its frailty and ephemerality.