PRIMORDIAL
BORDELINE Art Space, Iași
Curator: Călina Coman
4 noiembrie 2025
Cristina Garabețanu titles the present exhibition Primordial – a defiant, even strange term, especially when it refuses invitations toward semantic assimilation regarding an origin and implicitly rejects the legitimacy of any postulated truth. In this context, the word primordial twists and flows into a continuum of becoming. Any attempt to order the exhibition space according to a predictable logic proves futile: the internal structure of the exhibition unfolds in fluid currents and undulations that do not align with any narrative succession.
Technically, the works do not subordinate themselves to a single form of visual expression; instead, they intersect stylistically and morphologically, as if within an amniotic substance in which vagile organisms – forms that move freely throughout the gallery space – proliferate. The artist’s practice emanates contemplative processes articulated through a feminine lens, which Luce Irigaray seems to formulate as if gazing upon the exhibition itself: an ontology of the fluid, of becoming, a way of thinking that does not seek the closure or fixing of definitions, but rather permeability – one that becomes simultaneously conceptual, sensorial, poetic, and embodied.
From this perspective, the exhibition’s dynamics – its hybridization, mobility, and material interferences – may be read as an approach to the fluid (constituted through proximity, touch, breath, penetration, and insinuation), a mode of expression positioned in opposition to the epistemological rigidity of patriarchal rationality. Painting, photography, sculpture, stained glass, and object-based works meet in a personal dialogue that outlines a geography of feminine materiality. Although originating from distinct periods, the works communicate through an underlying energy, a shared matter that transcends the individuality of each piece.
All the works borrow from a genuine iconography of Nature, from macro to micro. Despite the universalized human figure in Ea vota genere vis (2020), in the small-format painting series, or in The Ethics of Knowing (2025), there is nevertheless a marked prevalence of the feminine figure, particularly accentuated in the analog photographs So Many of Us (2025) and Prime Faces (2025). Perhaps the most revealing are the mosaics Stone Flower (2025) and Source of Life (2025), which vividly express the symbiosis between the natural element (whether an oversized pistil or a miniaturized atoll) and the presence of the feminine body that governs them. To be primordial, in Garabețanu’s sense, does not mean to precede, but to dwell continuously in the ongoing expansion of becoming – in a world that never closes in on itself, where continuity smolders, breaks through, and is felt.
(Text by Călina Coman)
