ENTRY #1: ALEXANDRA MEREUȚI

The works exhibited are the result of a period of study whose point of departure was immediate reality, everyday things that were readily available. Being interested in the link between sight and drawing, I came to see the production of images in general as a process that resembles the transfer of information from the eye to the brain. I became conscious of the fact that irrespective of how information comes to be translated by a drawing, given the fact that the process has its starting-point in reality and not merely in some impulse in the imagination, the result of the translation will be essentially the same. Any and every sign is therefore important for me, since it is a trace of the initial information. 

Between the works and their context a parallel is created between an organic apparatus (the eye- brain-hand relationship) and another one that is mechanical. 

While in the first phase of the research the drawing is viewed as a witness that documents in signs the abilities of the sense of sight and reality, at this point the apparatus is viewed both as a witness and as its own eye, with its own reality. It is no longer a servant of humanity, a mechanism that exists only in order to produce for us images that resemble reality; rather, it is seen as an almost independent producer that reads information on its own, but in an impersonal way. 

The video exhibits were created over the course of a number of journeys on the same form of public transport, on an ordinary route, my interest being focused on the process and not on the subject filmed. The purpose of these works is to highlight the imagistic features of the equipment, with its misrepresentations, in order to show its autonomy in the creation of visual material and the distance that lies between it and the imitation of reality. 

The study of drawing is founded on the behaviour of the organic apparatus. e sense of sight is a kind of active observation that records and stores visual elements as part of its standard and non-stop behaviour. I have attempted to use drawing as a means to access information stored in the archives. The large-scale drawings are the organic apparatus’s reaction to an effort to recall. They are elements that have succeeded in entering and exiting via drawing from the visual memory of their own apparatus. 

Over the course of this study, my interest in drawing has grown concomitantly with my interest in the behaviour of the mechanical apparatus. The discoveries I have made while observing the behaviour of both pieces of apparatus have come to have a reciprocal influence on each other. Starting out from the argument that the camera is a means of imitating the human eye, I reversed the roles and attempted to use the organic apparatus to imitate the functions of the mechanical one. In an effort to grasp through drawing visual information situated at a great distance, I experimented with the ability of the eye to imitate the zoom function of a camera. 

Alexandra Mereuți (b. 1997) is a student in the Graphic Art Department of Cluj-Napoca University of Art and Design. She has fulfilled periods of work experience at the Florean Art Museum, Baia Mare, and in 2018 she completed a two-month apprenticeship in frescoes and church painting under the painter Alexandru Săsărman at Holy Trinity Episcopal Cathedral. In 2018 she obtained an Erasmus scholarship to study at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Bari. 

Apparatus is the exhibition project that won the Quadro 21 Gallery’s entry [’εntri] programme, launched in February 2019. The programme is aimed at strengthening the dialogue between artists, the Gallery and the public and encouraging the diversification of the Cluj art scene by promoting young artists.