Miklos Onucsan
04 Nov - 17 Dec 2011
© Miklos Onucsan
I Re-place the Horizontal of the Water (detail), 2011
site-specific installation, soil, spirit levels
I Re-place the Horizontal of the Water (detail), 2011
site-specific installation, soil, spirit levels
MIKLOS ONUCSAN
Unfinished Measurements
Curator: Madalina Brasoveanu
4 November – 17 December, 2011
Galeria Plan B is happy to announce the second personal exhibition in Germany by Romanian artist
Miklos Onucsan.
The project of the “unfinished measurements” began with the installation I re-place the horizontal of the water (2011): on a loamy surface, a sample of a dried-out water bed, the artist places, randomly but in a perfect horizontal position, spirit levels; the measuring instruments whose core is an air bubble trapped in liquid, thus a lack of the fluid, are brought to refill an absence – of the dried-out water – by marking one of its dimensions: the horizontality. We know nothing about the trauma of this place, no possible scenario for the water’s disappearance. What we know is that, when it was still there, the water was spread horizontally.
The coordinates traced by the spirit levels become thus marks of a topography of the absence, of a rigorous and repeated gesture, situated somewhere between oblivion and recovery, which declares, with each level set in its place, the conceptual articulation it is built on. An articulation that starts from logically correct deductions but somewhere on its way abandons the linearity of reasoning over a multiplicity that inflects the common sense. In many of Miklos’s works, the act of representing is built around a tension between logic and form situated, not once, near paradox, which is, yet, systematically avoided. In the installation I re-place the horizontal of the water, as in works such Unconditioned Air (2011), Looking Back (2011) or The Penultimate Surface (2011), the referent is always offsite/delayed compared to what we actually see; it is moving, in a continuous oscillation, in the space delimited, on one hand, by what the image makes visible, and on the other, by what the image makes intelligible, through the clues offered by the title. Despite their static nature, these works are sustained by some kind of process which negotiates its own deductive stages with our perception, aiming at making us to look with different eyes at the common reality. Thus, the works in the exhibition rarely make unequivocal statements (as in The Column with an End, 2011); instead, they create inquiring situations, they trigger processes in which affirming, questioning, and denying alternate continuously, and sabotage systematically the widely accepted established categories. These works define their presence by means of a complex set of relations with something absent or past, around which they build recovery scenarios.
And it is here where I place the “unfinished measurements”. The concept underlying this exhibition is borrowed from information theory, where “measurement” is defined as a set of observation that reduce uncertainty. Within this theory, all measurements are viewed as uncertain, so instead of assigning it one value, a range of values is assigned to a measurement, and a continuum between estimation and measurement is admitted. Regarded through this notion, the works in the exhibition set themselves as a constellation of contemporary situations which avoid the immediate and stable indication of a single meaning; instead, they articulate a specific set of observations meant to anchor them in their own present tense, in order to reduce some of its uncertainties. By means of the measurements they orchestrate, these works seek to place themselves in the balancing point between “seeing” and “naming”, between “revealing” and “concealing”, and they escape thus any attempt of complete explanation, of concrete articulation.
I set myself to regard the works in this exhibition through the notion of “measurement” aiming to withdraw them, this way, from an approach that would legitimize them within a socio- and geo-political perspective; confronted with the difficulties of configuring a terminology and a set criteria specific for the eastern European art, I’ve preferred to resort to a concept neutral to cultural geography, and to try an experiment: that of looking at these works “in suspension”, from the point of view of a notion that molds itself, in my view, their inner logic. Miklos Onucsan was born 1952 in Gherla, Romania, lives and works in Oradea, Romania. His recent personal exhibitions include Markings of the Working Area at Nicodim Gallery in Los Angeles (2010) and What I Have to Do Tomorrow I Should Have Done Yesterday at Plan B in Berlin (2009). Recent group exhibitions include: Anthem of People’s Love, Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles; Barricade of Dreams, Trafo, Budapest; Romanian Cultural Resolution - Documentary, The New Gallery of IRCCU, 54th Biennale di Venezia; Image to be projected until it vanishes, Museion, Bolzano; The May Salon, Plan B, Cluj; Curated by_Rene Block, ENTREPOT, Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna; Experiment and community - Atelier 35 Oradea, MODEM Debrecen; Here and Then, Club Electro Putere, Craiova; I Am a Romanian: The Bucharest - Tel Aviv Route, Tel Aviv (2011); When History Comes Knocking, Plan B, Berlin; An image instead of a title, Club Elecro Putere, Craiova; Romanian Cultural Resolution, Spinnerei, Leipzig; STARTER, at Arter Istambul; Berlin Show #2, Plan B, Berlin; A Harmonious Mix of Objects, Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles (2010).
Unfinished Measurements
Curator: Madalina Brasoveanu
4 November – 17 December, 2011
Galeria Plan B is happy to announce the second personal exhibition in Germany by Romanian artist
Miklos Onucsan.
The project of the “unfinished measurements” began with the installation I re-place the horizontal of the water (2011): on a loamy surface, a sample of a dried-out water bed, the artist places, randomly but in a perfect horizontal position, spirit levels; the measuring instruments whose core is an air bubble trapped in liquid, thus a lack of the fluid, are brought to refill an absence – of the dried-out water – by marking one of its dimensions: the horizontality. We know nothing about the trauma of this place, no possible scenario for the water’s disappearance. What we know is that, when it was still there, the water was spread horizontally.
The coordinates traced by the spirit levels become thus marks of a topography of the absence, of a rigorous and repeated gesture, situated somewhere between oblivion and recovery, which declares, with each level set in its place, the conceptual articulation it is built on. An articulation that starts from logically correct deductions but somewhere on its way abandons the linearity of reasoning over a multiplicity that inflects the common sense. In many of Miklos’s works, the act of representing is built around a tension between logic and form situated, not once, near paradox, which is, yet, systematically avoided. In the installation I re-place the horizontal of the water, as in works such Unconditioned Air (2011), Looking Back (2011) or The Penultimate Surface (2011), the referent is always offsite/delayed compared to what we actually see; it is moving, in a continuous oscillation, in the space delimited, on one hand, by what the image makes visible, and on the other, by what the image makes intelligible, through the clues offered by the title. Despite their static nature, these works are sustained by some kind of process which negotiates its own deductive stages with our perception, aiming at making us to look with different eyes at the common reality. Thus, the works in the exhibition rarely make unequivocal statements (as in The Column with an End, 2011); instead, they create inquiring situations, they trigger processes in which affirming, questioning, and denying alternate continuously, and sabotage systematically the widely accepted established categories. These works define their presence by means of a complex set of relations with something absent or past, around which they build recovery scenarios.
And it is here where I place the “unfinished measurements”. The concept underlying this exhibition is borrowed from information theory, where “measurement” is defined as a set of observation that reduce uncertainty. Within this theory, all measurements are viewed as uncertain, so instead of assigning it one value, a range of values is assigned to a measurement, and a continuum between estimation and measurement is admitted. Regarded through this notion, the works in the exhibition set themselves as a constellation of contemporary situations which avoid the immediate and stable indication of a single meaning; instead, they articulate a specific set of observations meant to anchor them in their own present tense, in order to reduce some of its uncertainties. By means of the measurements they orchestrate, these works seek to place themselves in the balancing point between “seeing” and “naming”, between “revealing” and “concealing”, and they escape thus any attempt of complete explanation, of concrete articulation.
I set myself to regard the works in this exhibition through the notion of “measurement” aiming to withdraw them, this way, from an approach that would legitimize them within a socio- and geo-political perspective; confronted with the difficulties of configuring a terminology and a set criteria specific for the eastern European art, I’ve preferred to resort to a concept neutral to cultural geography, and to try an experiment: that of looking at these works “in suspension”, from the point of view of a notion that molds itself, in my view, their inner logic. Miklos Onucsan was born 1952 in Gherla, Romania, lives and works in Oradea, Romania. His recent personal exhibitions include Markings of the Working Area at Nicodim Gallery in Los Angeles (2010) and What I Have to Do Tomorrow I Should Have Done Yesterday at Plan B in Berlin (2009). Recent group exhibitions include: Anthem of People’s Love, Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles; Barricade of Dreams, Trafo, Budapest; Romanian Cultural Resolution - Documentary, The New Gallery of IRCCU, 54th Biennale di Venezia; Image to be projected until it vanishes, Museion, Bolzano; The May Salon, Plan B, Cluj; Curated by_Rene Block, ENTREPOT, Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna; Experiment and community - Atelier 35 Oradea, MODEM Debrecen; Here and Then, Club Electro Putere, Craiova; I Am a Romanian: The Bucharest - Tel Aviv Route, Tel Aviv (2011); When History Comes Knocking, Plan B, Berlin; An image instead of a title, Club Elecro Putere, Craiova; Romanian Cultural Resolution, Spinnerei, Leipzig; STARTER, at Arter Istambul; Berlin Show #2, Plan B, Berlin; A Harmonious Mix of Objects, Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles (2010).