“What is the depth? It is the silence before the world was uttered.”
Gaston Bachelard, Water and Dreams
The Inverse Breath of the World is a group exhibition that brings together three distinct voices – Alina Aldea, Zsolt Berszán, and Mihai Florea – in a dialogue about the fragility of perception, the limits of matter, and the inner power of the unconscious. Among the works presented, there is a subtle common thread of the inner space, a hybrid between dream, memory, and matter. A shared place where the body, the landscape, and the subconscious meet and intertwine.
This inner territory is introduced by the artists either through the distillation of a vegetal laboratory, as in the case of Alina Aldea’s drawings, through a visceral gestural landscape in Zsolt Berszán’s colored fields, or in an oneiric mode, through Mihai Florea’s paintings, which stemmed from a dream he had many years ago.
The Inverse Breath of the World can also be interpreted as an exploration of liminal spaces – those territories where dream, memory, and matter overlap. Alina Aldea, through her series of drawings, cultivates a sensitive and internalized vegetal world, where fragility becomes a latent force. Her laboratory is a rigorous and fragile space, composed of organic forms suspended in a kind of network. This laboratory is an extension of the inner body, a place where growth and regeneration are decanted and distilled.
In contrast, yet somehow in consonance, Zsolt Berszán, through his Field painting series, proposes a return to matter, to a corporeality reduced to its essence. His field is a tense surface, where form arises from an internal, telluric force. The field, in Berszán’s case, is not simply a landscape, but rather a membrane, a place where pigment becomes form, building a presence through absence.
In Mihai Florea’s works, the oneiric universe gains visual consistency, becoming an alternative language of the real. In his paintings, the artist composes fluid images taken from the subconscious, turning painting into a space of revelation, a cartography of his own dreams and their memory. The artist attempts to translate immaterial reality into an evocative visual language.
The Inverse Breath of the World is a proposal to look differently. It is an exhibition about what is not immediately seen, but about what exists in overlapping layers: of dream, of matter, of memory. The works propose another kind of time, a different mode of understanding and movement, in which the viewer must turn inward, to feel beyond sight.
Curator: Diana Dochia, PhD
