There's more to the problem

Featured Artists

Stefano Calligaro, Anna Dot, Petra Feriancová, Norbert Filep, Camille Llobet, Cristina Garrido, Sorin Neamțu, Ian Waelder 

Curated by

Francesco Giaveri

We’ve talked a lot about the possibilities of including texts in visual art in general and in the field of painting in particular. You can approach this subject from many angles, all of which are significantly related to our lives. It’s about both comprehension and perception.

Is writing a text on a canvas a painting? Or is it still just writing?

In any case, painting a text is a slow, almost ascetic process.

Painting is stronger than ever in the contemporary art world, but the juxtaposition of images and texts is everywhere in contemporary culture globally. From Instagram to memes, this relationship is a key aspect of understanding the communication that is all around us nowadays, and it says a lot about our way of life.

A painter’s will to present a text through an old language (painting) appears to us as a great contradiction because, in our world, communication needs to be as fast as possible. And when we chat on social media we make countless spelling mistakes, because it doesn’t matter; the point is to be quick.

But painting is slow and complicated. Reading a text and understanding it requires a certain amount of time. Reading a text in a painting is even harder; nevertheless, a text in a painting catches the viewer’s attention immediately, like an advert on a bus or a meme on a smartphone. But then you need to stop to understand more about it.

This probably happens because a translation is involved.

It takes a long time to do a painting or to prepare any other work of art, and, most importantly, a long time to enjoy it. Even taking advantage of what we see or experience in an exhibition requires time.

This group show is dedicated to the relationship between texts and images and how the participating artists both present and represent texts. We present texts from different perspectives to explore contemplation, narration, slowness, translation and shared perceptions, all the way to the limits of language itself, as we experience when we read a text as an artwork.

What can contemporary artists tell us about the relationship between the text and its perception? Understanding this may lead us to a fuller understanding of the communication that surrounds us and probably help us to live better – not faster, just better.

About the Artists

Norbert Filep

Norbert Filep is a contemporary Romanian artist living and working in Cluj-Napoca. In the last two years, his work has gone through different practices, mainly articulated through the medium of drawing as the central mechanism for his conceptual approach to abstraction.

In his work, Environmental narratives series, the artist depicts natural settings, on which he intervenes with a text consisting of a structure of superimposed letters in a repetitive manner that creates a visual tension between the monochrome landscapes and the typographic elements. The repetitive presentation of the letters invites the viewer to get closer to the work, stimulating a thoughtful exploration of the composition in order to discover each letter individually. This necessary closeness creates a direct interaction with the work, amplifying the visual and conceptual impact of the text integrated into artworks.

Sorin Neamțu

In his artistic approach, Sorin Neamțu starts from drawing and painting to question the new territories of contemporary art through performance, objects and installations.

The artist's work entitled When you see… explores the role of text in the context of visual arts, questioning whether the intervention of a text on the canvas can confer it the title of a work of art. Through this questioning, Sorin Neamțu investigates the boundaries between written language and artistic expression, pointing out the tension and conflict between them, while at the same time reiterating the limits of human perception.

Camille Llobet

Camille Llobet is a visual artist and filmmaker from France. In the video projection, titled Revers, the artist creates a performance as she walks through the Milly-la-Forêt forest with her eyes closed, questioning the limits of verbal description of perception. The artist describes the evanescent shapes around her as they appear and pass while she keeps her eyes closed. The description in real time, aloud, explores the interplay of influences and synchronizations between perceived reality and its thought-out and formulated representation.

Ian Waelder

Ian Waelder is a Spanish-American artist and publisher currently based in Frankfurt am Main. Waelder's work is developed through photography, sculpture, sound and installation.

His work, entitled In the flesh of my memory, was conceived in such a way that the message can only be deciphered when viewed from a particular angle, thus inviting the viewer to adopt a specific perspective. The trace of the text left on the wall, barely discernible, almost faded, becomes a visual metaphor for the ephemeral and imprecise nature of memories.

Petra Feriancová

Petra Feriancová, an artist based in Bratislava, Slovakia, explores diverse media, from photography to installation and books, tackling themes such as perception, mortality and intimacy. In the exhibition There's more to the problem, the artist presents works that investigate the flexibility of visual and semantic language, demonstrating how slight changes can transform the meaning of words. Feriancová also shares fragments from her own intimate diary, transforming personal vulnerability into a collective experience that connects honesty and intimate communication.

Stefano Calligaro

Stefano Calligaro, born in Cividale del Friuli (Italy) and based in Cluj, is an artist whose works explore the transformative potential of language. His Poetricks are at the same time artworks, minimal poems and tools used to question and redefine the essence, purpose and limits of art, language and poetry. Taking a playful approach to language, the artist initiates a process of deconstruction and reconstruction of words, inviting the audience to reflect on the relationship between form and meaning.

Cristina Garrido

Cristina Garrido, a visual artist from Spain, pursues in her art practice the value that is culturally ascribed to objects; mostly those objects classified as art, through specific, repetitive and meta-referential gestures.

The work presented in the exhibition There's more to the problem, entitled Paragraphs on Make-up Art, consists of a collage of several make-up tutorials in order to recontextualize them, emphasizing the relationship between image and text. In the intentional absence of sound from the video, the artist intervened with text, taken from Sol LeWitt's Paragraphs on conceptual art, redirecting the audience's attention and making them focus on the process of transforming the message. Through this technique, the artist emphasizes how text associated with an image can radically change its meaning.

Anna Dot

Anna Dot is an artist originally from Spain, whose work stems from a fascination with translation and the impact that language has on the way we live, relate and perceive the world.

The work What is it that makes a painting be a painting? is a series of thoughts, a letter to visitors, in which the artist questions the power of language and the creative act of writing. Anna Dot emphasizes the presence of nature in any form of writing, noting how the stains accidentally left by the pen can be associated with natural forms, such as clouds. This symbolic association gives her the opportunity to reflect on how unintentional shapes, as well as alphabets we do not know, can acquire aesthetic meaning.