As the title suggests, the exhibition starts from a visual reinterpretation of some key ideas from the Temptation to Exist by Emil Cioran, proposing an artistic transposition of the “thinking doomed to lucidity”. “Masters in the art of thinking against oneself, Nietzsche, Baudelaire and Dostoevsky – wrote Cioran – have taught us to side with our dangers, to broaden the sphere of our diseases, to acquire existence by division from our own being.” “The art of thinking against oneself” and “acquire existence by division from your own being” – between these two milestones, Ada Muntean’s project plays with a whole arsenal of concepts meant to “provide a mediation between reality and illusion, material and immaterial, intellect and affection, certainty and relativity and, last but not least, between reality and its projection in art”.
The temptation to exist – a personal interpretation of Emil Cioran’s book – becomes the temptation to understand and feel life in all its complexity, says Ada Muntean. Thus, the new series of works question reality starting from corporality, by projecting an extremely relative and volatile image of the self, analysing the perverse and interdependent duality between the notions of perception and deception given by contextually placed images.
Mediating Illusion. The Temptation to Exist proposes an interdisciplinary, conceptual and immersive way to explore the expressive potential of matter and the context in which it takes shape. The reflection of a society and its transgressions through the human figure concretizes an artistic approach about the human nature per se and how this human nature becomes socially contextualized. The body and the universe around it become tools for art to sometimes shock, or, with an expression of Cioran, to “alienate metaphysically”, with the stake to perceive the truth in an authentic way. A truth both about the world and about ourselves, turning the known into the unknown and dissolving the boundary between reality and its projection.
Estopia Art Gallery Lugano, Switzerland
