© Mihail Moldoveanu
Kowasa Gallery Mallorca, 235 08008 Barcelone Espagne
KOWASA gallery is pleased to announce Mallorca / New York, an exhibition by Mihail Moldoveanu. The show gathers together approximately 60 B/W photographs that belong to Landscape Studies – Costa Nord, Mallorca and Urban Arias : New York, two different bodies of work, produced between 1990 and 2012, and materialised in the form of an artist’s book and an installation. Though geographically remote, both series carry Moldoveanu’s passion for the study of landscape in its various natural and artificial configurations.
The show opens with Landscape Studies – Costa Nord, Mallorca. The installation is built up as a photographic palimpsest that provides a thorough study of the famous for its natural beauty northern part of the island. Neutral and rigorous, Moldoveanu’s documentary mode registers with perseverance the tree forms and other natural elements of an area that has been relatively unaffected by human incursion. Its eagerness for distance, objectivity and typology owes pretty much to the tradition of the last decades –especially the legacy of the Düsseldorf School and North-American New Topographics. Far away from these formal and stylistic correlations, Mihail Moldoveanu recognizes the substantial affinities of his practice with the spirit of cultivated artists and writers of the pre-photographic and pre-industrial era, who were trying to capture the essence of the places they visited during their long journeys –exotic places, sealed by centuries and civilizations. A painter, architect and historian himself, Moldoveanu has chosen to use here, instead of the brush or pencil, the modern per excellence photographic apparatus. Mallorca became a perfect set for registering the special components of the landscape and the traces of man. As he confesses: “Since my first visits to the island, I was fascinated by peculiar associations established between Nature’s forms and otother artificial forms conceived and developed a posteriori by man and civilization”. “In this sense”, he adds, “the series Landscape Studies – Costa Nord, Mallorca provides a twofold reflexion on nature converted into culture and culture that turns into nature”. This is the leitmotif of the gaze here; a strikingly graphic gaze, imbued with an extraordinary visual awareness. A gaze with talent and sensibility that Moldoveanu usually accompanies with notes and drawings, establishing, as if through a personal diary, a dialogue between the miracles of nature and man.
In a different tone, Urban Arias : New York is articulated as a sequence of urban fragments that suggest a personal and intimate form of poetry belonging to New York. Modern ruins in oblivion alternate with frequently visited and busy places. Thorough and agile like his documentary photography antecedents – Atget, or Walker Evans for instance –, Moldoveanu’s gaze reveals unsuspected corners, while managing to transmit the essence and palpitations of this paradigmatic “modern city”. The idea, according to the author, is part of an attempt “to approach the mysterious, profound and irresistible charm of NYC, away from its legendary heroic aspect, away from folkloric tricks and clichés”. If in Mallorca nature embraces the landscape with the primitivism of its forms conferring to it a new primary, almost primitive significance (while in the same time “culture becomes nature”), here what prevails is an artificial nature, conceived and engendered within the way of life of the 20th century; it is all about an a priori altered landscape that rediscovers nature and its all-time universal symbols, and appropriates it. Moldoveanu captures with his camera the latent scores of this genuine American iconography of neon landscapes. Conferring on many of his works titles that evoke rhythms of jazz – the most urban and New York genre –, he constructs his sequences as a partition of an “urban score”.
The exhibition concludes with a Wunderkammer: In this part the photographic practice of Mihail Moldoveanu interlaces with his other passions, drawing, painting and collage. All this, through a selection of some photographs of landscapes, onto which the author intervenes with pencils or brushes.