May 29 – July 19, 2021 | Palace Ground Floor

The first white circle possessed an irregular epidermis, bearing calcified landforms from a lunar world. Through a series of textures, the exhibition sensorially renders various cutouts of unknown landscapes—lunar, desert, monochrome, and arid vedute. These are fragments of Yemeni memories and visual conglomerates that the artist has carried with her, within her, for nearly a quarter of a century. The bas-reliefs and objects that compose the exhibition path synesthetically recreate, through sounds and images, lived experiences and living memories that evoke the atmosphere of the streets, the house, the salty sea, the sky, and the ochres of the harsh Yemeni sand; a concentrated atmosphere described through a minimalist language. The space is populated by primal geometric figures: circles, squares, spheres, heavily laden with pictorial matter that defines a flesh-like volumetry—demanding to be touched, felt, and sensed. The forms depict successions of highly diverse emotions—angular, sharp, abrupt, sinuous, circular—taking on the working dynamics of the artist’s own memory. At a structural level, compositional derivations and interstitial contaminations of the primal figures occur, evolving into hybrid shapes: semicircle-squares, axially off-centered semicircles. There is a playful-documentary dimension to the entire endeavor, which can be deciphered as a returned journey into the inner world of the artist’s childhood, a realm where words lack the capacity to define events, impressions, or feelings—these being replaced, transcribed, and molded directly into the epidermis of the artworks. The interaction process between the viewer and the exhibition’s scenography triggers an unrepeatable, unmediated type of experiment, catalyzed precisely by the abstract irregularities of the surfaces. They visually simulate a fractal that unfolds endlessly as the eye approaches the pictorial layer. The reading dynamic is that of a continuous zoom-in / zoom-out, through a circuit that brings the retina into contact with the epidermis, the gaze with the tactile.

Curator: Ana Negoiță