Andrei Nacu

Mining in Deposits of Light

March 6 - April 30, 2018

In his recent publication, The Exform, Nicolas Bourriaud identifies a tendency in contemporary art to revisit and explore the remnants and wastes of capitalist hyper-production: the detritus of linguistic and semiotic practices, the ruins of material culture, and the insignificant objects through whose exclusion contemporary society constructs the illusion of a coherent and stable reality. According to the French curator and theorist, the political task of contemporary art is to render the world precarious, continually affirming the transitional and circumstantial nature of the institutions that structure social life. This often becomes possible by emphasizing the recalcitrant materiality of processes, events, and historical objects that surround us.

Andrei Nacu, in his turn, combines the critical investigation of archives—provisionally constructed by incorporating vernacular images collected from flea markets—with the persistent unraveling of the processes through which images incorporate, within their materiality, the labor and context of their own production. The similarities between Nacu’s artistic project and cultural archaeology—which, according to Walter Benjamin, excavates the ruins of everyday life to extract meanings concealed beneath the destructive effects of time—are striking. His deceptively simple works exemplify the growing interest in subjective archiving within contemporary art. The notions of contingency and the materialization of the passage of time play a fundamental role in his fortuitous and subjective encounters with the objects and images he discovers.

The artworks presented in the exhibition Mining in Deposits of Light highlight the tension between the flux of images in contemporary visual culture, their power dynamics within the social field, and the rational yet retrospective reconstruction of historical events through chance collisions. These chance happenings invariably impose ruptures in the fabric of the present they seek to explain. This is why these works consciously adopt a poverist and minimalist aesthetic, recalling the atmosphere of the artistic experiments of the 1970s. The emphasis on the materiality of the image highlights the distance between our present-day concerns and the formal investigations of that era.

Although the exhibition uses analog photography and film as its primary media, the images and visual assemblages presented transcend the conventional regime of representation, especially that of photographic evidence. Nacu assembles and disassembles images that, in different ways, carry a performative dimension. These images reveal a raw, material, often non-human, and sometimes absurd form of labor that transcends the semiotic regime of cognitive work associated with visual art understood as a factory of representations. Whether it is a 16mm film that produces an abstract representation through the mechanical scratching of the film reel during projection, or the decomposition of a 10-minute recording of the Ceaușescu couple’s execution—where the artist recomposes only the margins of the 250 frames in an abstract diptych, situating the viewer inside the image’s reality—the presented works are always self-generative. These images are created simultaneously with the deconstruction of their support: the dismantling of frames and other discrete visual units that usually break the continuum of experience to assign meaning to this sensory multitude. They encapsulate a paradox: every iconoclastic gesture is also productive, as the image itself resists annihilation. The disappearance of a representation generates a new image: the image of its disappearance, its trace.

The metaphor of mining, alongside the dissection of an image on film—associated by Walter Benjamin with the artist as a surgeon—can also be seen as an archival operation. This process reconstructs the paradoxical disappearance of images in collective memory, caused by classification and codification. The dissection of the photographic frame, referenced in the exhibition's title, is another analytical operation inspired by medical practice and evokes a forensic framework. This metaphor suggests an inquiry into the body of the image to detect the causes of a (typically traumatic) event. It is no coincidence that this operation often works on a "dead body": its purpose is to diagnose and restore an interrupted order of events through symptoms, without altering the course of history. Thus, as Jacques Derrida observed, the archive is haunted by a death drive, functioning as "the place where the image goes to die," even as its machinery strives to ensure immortality. In this sense, the dissection of an image becomes an archival gesture, reconstructing its disappearance in collective memory through reclassification and reinterpretation.

Nacu’s interventions on the surfaces of images are often random, incorporating structural principles derived from cracks in the printed image’s materiality or introducing material disruptions that destabilize the homogeneous construction of representation. In other instances, Nacu abstracts iconic frames from contemporary Romanian culture—such as those founded on the violent social rupture of 1989—by magnifying them into pixelated abstractions. This transformation refuses the monocular perspective and evokes the panoramic model, placing the viewer inside the image’s frame. The diptych, created through this process, interrogates the spectator’s current position and the enduring effects of historical events as they resonate in the present.

Finally, Nacu proposes an absurd archive that operates not on the materiality of pictures but on the process of constructing images as mental representations. Using an exercise in classifying hay as his starting point, he mimics the information-management processes typical of 1960s and 1970s conceptual art. The uselessness of this obsessive structuring process deconstructs our expectations of the artist’s labor as inherently critical, politically efficacious, or discursively relevant, deliberately failing to produce a coherent representation of natural epistemology.

By foregrounding the performativity and materiality of images—as opaque contact surfaces that destabilize viewers rather than permeable screens reconstituting subjectivity—the exhibition ultimately affirms the precariousness of meaning-making in aesthetic experience. Equally significant is the way the works produced for this exhibition disengage artistic labor from its representational function, opening it up to new possibilities for value and meaning.

Curated by Cristian Nae