”Utopias represent an ideal toward which the mundane world must reach.” (Edward Rothstein, Visions of Utopia)

History bears witness that utopias are triggers of revolutions and the fuel of progress, and yet it is human nature to strive for change. 

The artworks of Iulian Bisericaru and Anetta Mona Chisa represent in this way a perfect match to explore the culture-nature duality, juxtaposing the ideal and the real through sculpture and painting. The very fact that civilization is built up against nature is a painterly dramaturgy in Bisercaru’s works that evokes a tension between a beautiful catastrophe and a peaceful realm.

It is a premiere for the artists to exhibit their works together, finding common threads on the idea of process and perception, walking the line on art cannons and means of representation. Iulian Bisericaru’s imagined solitary futures make us reconsider painting in its post-sublime age, connected to modernity not through technology, but through nature and science. Bisericaru reflects on how landscapes are now mediated by a digital language of detail and oversight, scrutinizing details, using his eyesight as the zooming lens of a scientific device, and stopping over the details of the cacti, well-known for surviving through the drought. He portrays them as winners, contrasting shades of pink that symbolize pollution, artificiality, and anxiety-connected, with an infinite range of shades of green. The ochre, brown, or grey hues connect the two worlds.

In response, Anetta Mona Chisa’s symbiotic dialogue with gypsum and calcium opens doors to escape associative thinking, inviting the imagination to open up new worlds where we can observe an inorganic intent towards primordial structures. The artist imagines matter as a dense, non-subjective, and affirming force, dancing silently on chemical interactions. Her objects are made of gypsum, allowed to grow, interact and sculpt themselves in organic shapes with the momentum that the artist provides. Gypsum and marble are both calcium-based sediments, formed as a consequence of countless unknown forces, too unpredictable to be measured, that shape many living and non-living bodies from within and from outside. Everything that contains calcium today flourished in the Jurassic period. Thus, marble and gypsum were once vital and fully expanded lifeforms that ultimately perished, becoming compacted and compressed. How do minerals like gypsum and marble relate to the evolution of large-scale structures in nature? How can we trace and depict a biography of these sedimentary rocks? How can we narrate these raw geological materials, both before and after they were infected by human interaction?