on / off the grid – painting now: with an introductory note by Alina Șerban

With this group exhibition, the Jecza Gallery & Triade Interart Foundation opens a new series of dedicated collaborations with international artists whose distinct aesthetic vocabulary incorporates pertinent questions regarding the historical nature of contemporaneity and who, at the same time, find an conceptual counterpart locally, in the attitudes of an artistic generation from Timișoara in the 70s, remarkable both for its concerns for the geometric rigour and formal essentialization as well as for its proximity to social reality, by projecting some new experience (utopian in their nature) associated with design or architecture.

By emphasising not only the importance of these spontaneous encounters between the past and the present, between the local and international, but also the need to open new perspectives for the interpretation of a universal conceptual background, the „on/off the grid” explores alternative ways of revisiting and renewing the polyphonic and sometimes conflicting voices of modernity. Starting from the abstracted visions of the real and reaching the fragile narratives of the public sphere and the constructed space, the „on/off the grid” engages bridges between the artistic object and the reality around it. The insistence with which the (still unconsumed) legacy of modernity is signaled and transformed does not isolate the artist from the everyday flow. On the contrary. From the sculptural contours of the inhabited architecture to the anonymity of urban non-spaces, from the seduction and ambiguity of everyday objects to the spatial experiments with the abstract form, the works presented in the „on / off the grid” exhibition are a response to this world in permanent change.

The exhibition is part of the IN/OUT project by Triade Foundation supported by the Municipality of Timisoara, through the Centre of Projects.