This exhibition took place at our previous Berlin location.
Galeria Plan B is pleased to announce the second solo exhibition of Sorin Câmpan with the gallery, opening Friday, June 25.
Dream from the night of 2/3 March 2021
I was preparing Sorin Câmpan’s exhibition. It had more works than I expected and they were already displayed in two places, two caves very far away one from the other. They were semi-obscure but reachable places, dimly lit by the daylight penetrating the mountain’ cracks and slantingly projecting on the walls. Neatly arranged there, the works have picked up as by imitation the colour of the stone, were painted in greys and light earthy shades, and their compositions surprisingly had many characters that seemed to tell together a simple story from the beginning of humankind. All humans were painted the same way, caught in motion, small in relation to the frame of the painting. In the second cave I met Andrei Câmpan, the son of the artist, who came to help me with the exhibition; Andrei tells me he want to show me something special and we enter a room in the mountain where there is a great carpet on the floor, also grey and old, perfectly hidden in the semi-obscurity. The pattern of the carpet looks like a moss that has parasitized its surface; Andrei picks it up and we fix it together on the wall of the cave, then stand back to watch. Over the grown muscle Câmpan senior had painted this time a few objects, all of them small and geometrical, a kind of precious boxes having a surprising, illogical chromatic and dimensional relation one with the other and that persisting watching made them ever more visible on the mass of the carpet. We were watching them, they were getting coloured. We stopped focusing, they became hidden again. When they got coloured they started slowly to have a yellow outline. But one second of inattention was enough for the yellow to fade back in the cement-like grey of the cave.
Mihai Pop
Sorin Câmpan's works reach an apparent simplicity after performing a series of detours and a nuanced reflection upon the painting instruments; they have to be carefully 'read' in order to be understood in their enigmatic composition. The geometry of his works has an almost hypnotic effect upon the viewer and seems to perfectly fit the chromatic extravaganza. If we could talk about an affluence of artists situated in our close vicinity whose art continues to speak to us, we can definitely count Sorin Câmpan among them. Neither the size, nor the number of his works is what really recommends him, let alone a particular social visibility (Câmpan remains quasi unknown even to people sharing the same field of interest), but the authentic, uninhibited relationship he has established with the medium of painting.
Sorin Câmpan, b. 1940, lives and works in Cluj, Romania. Recent exhibitions include: Time and place at the Galeria Plan B, Cluj (2010), Campan & Campani - Art in the Family, Romanian Cultural Institute, Venice (2018), guest artist in Mircea Cantor's exhibition CHASSEUR D'IMAGES, Musée de la Chasse et Nature, Paris (2019) and the solo exhibition La lune et autre chose, Galerie Hussenot, Paris (2020).
Press release courtesy Galeria Plan B.
Potsdamer Strasse 77-87
Building G, Second Courtyard
Berlin, 10785
Germany
www.plan-b.ro
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Tues - Sat, 12pm - 6pm by appointment