HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT – 2023

 

Hiding in Plain Sight is a group exhibition composed of a series of distinct artistic visions regarding the construction and deconstruction of reality. Each one both hides and reveals through shape and concept, subtle aspects and elements that decrypt a personal universe starting from a predictable ordinary and reimagines it in distinct, expressive alternatives.
Kafka commented on Picasso’s work: “Through the distorted mirror of art, reality appears undistorted.” Thus, a work of art has the capacity to plastically reconfigure reality, while keeping its essence and authenticity, in its aim to capture a rather relative truth. The project Hiding in Plain Sight can be seen as a game of camouflage between shape and idea, visible and invisible, clarity and ambiguity, relativity and absolute.
The artistic image creates a red thread for reading fragments of reality that the artist selects and synthesizes through an essentially self-referential approach. “I believe that art is an obsession for life” confessed Francis Bacon “and after all, the greatest obsession we have is for ourselves.”
The approach of each artist reveals the metaphorical configuration of an indirect self-portrait and, more than that, becomes the testimony of reality as lived and felt individually. A composition can “hide” elements in plain sight, just as reality “hides” unusual and precious aspects and details for an eye open to receiving, with the potential to be explored artistically.
Hiding in Plain Sight also becomes a metaphor for the position of contemporary art within the present complex reality, and of the artistic process’ place in configuring pieces based on experiences that involve aesthetic and conceptual subtlety.

 

Artists: Norbert Filep, Mathias Bar, Dragoș Bădiță, Dan Beudean, Ada Muntean, Sasha Bandi, Călin Dumitrașcu
Curator: Ada Muntean
Biju Gallery Cluj-Napoca