Ștefan Curelici | Stone upon stone is a building

The exhibition “𝗦𝘁𝗼𝗻𝗲 𝘂𝗽𝗼𝗻 𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗻𝗲 𝗶𝘀 𝗮 𝗯𝘂𝗶𝗹𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴” of the young painter 𝗦̦𝘁𝗲𝗳𝗮𝗻 𝗖𝘂𝗿𝗲𝗹𝗶𝗰𝗶 (recent graduate of a master’s degree at the Faculty of Arts and Design in Timișoara) examines the potential of built space beyond systemic planning, interpreting the city through the lens of the invisible structures, the imaginary and the pictorial reconstruction, offering a new understanding of spatial alterity in relation to both individual and societal evolution as a whole. The title „Stone upon stone is a building” is inspired by the poem with the same name, written by Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948), the well-known author of the „Merzbau” house and installation, a project that remains one of the most important landmarks of both art and contemporary architecture, having extensive conceptual meanings.

At first glance, Ștefan Curelici’s paintings, unlike Kurt Schwitters’ house – installation, is positioning us as external observers of some familiar architectural moments and sites (from Timișoara, Lugoj, etc.), in a process in which the individual places themselves outside the built space, but if we find them inside the space, they have rather a passing and transitory function, in which architecture has the dominant function within the image.

On a closer look, however, we can distinguish the complex relationship that the artist has with the urban system, which results in a very personal and structural kind of map. Ștefan works at an intimate scale, in which the viewer is, in fact, invited to imagine their own scale in relation to the built space that they inhabit, transit, dominate or allows to be dominated by.

Urban architecture receives a function of internalization, in which buildings do not represent a mere space or site, but a suite of spaces “folded” into other spaces, a universe of interiors in a permanent state of alteration, of individual repositioning. It is what the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, via Liebniz, calls “the inner world manifesting in the intrabody”, a house that lives within us, a monad in which the external world is a reflection of the inner one, a dynamic and open state, a living mechanism which determines the architectural system to be in a constant state of metamorphosis.