THEO presents 『The Hour Between Dog and Wolf』 a solo exhibition by Mircea Teleagă from March 23 to April 19, 2024.

The Hour Between Dog and Wolf

Mircea Teleagă (born 1989) is a Romanian, London-based artist known for his oil paintings that feature landscapes, border areas and liminal spaces. He mainly works within figurative painting and often employs elements of abstract painting into his work. The current exhibition 'The Hour Between Dog and Wolf' brings together a series of works which focus on various mysterious landscapes, borders and terrariums, all bearing the presence of humans.

The title of the exhibition hints at those particular hours in the day in which, because of dim light conditions, one cannot distinguish between a dog and a wolf. The light of this border hour is that in which Teleagă chooses to present these solitary places. The artist draws attention to both space and time in order to outline this universe. The many terrariums featured in the exhibition create an artificial harmony in which our everyday lives, are cushioned with 'nature', becoming a meditation on impermanence, and an involuntary collaboration between nature and human.

A constant in Teleagă's work is the mysterious time of day which imbues the places and landscapes he depicts. This is a period of time in which our senses can easily deceive us. Clarity gives way to doubt as we tend to see things which are not there. Still places seem to reveal something hidden and potentially menacing. Reason gives way to an unsettling tension as our minds focus on the unrevealed. The painter has a special relationship with time and suspends the settings in a permanent bubble. Awakening some kind of primordial hunter instinct, the viewer ponders between being the pursuer and being vigilant, while traversing these new scapes.

The wilderness we see is contained. A terrarium is a small garden which recreates a natural environment in a glass or transparent container. Exploring the relationship between the pictorial space and the methods of articulating it, Teleagă creates a special kind of terrarium which explores boundaries, amongst which, those between the natural and the human made. Just like any terrarium or glass tank, Teleagă's works are a display case in which his most personal concerns and interests have been kept together for a long time, have grown and have developed into a unique ecosystem. The terrarium becomes a chronicle where this invisible space speaks volumes about the people surrounding it. Once decorative and now filled with clutter, deprived of privacy and air, these spaces hint at the dangers of climate change and at the need for an ever shrinking personal space. The liminal worlds depicted seem miniaturized, even claustrophobic and are populated by specific objects, many of them utilitarian in nature. The objects and the places themselves overwhelm the senses. The smell of a fire pit, oil cans, burnt cables, gasoline, and even the orange, noxious, dusty air of the city outline the world we are seeing. One cannot stop and think about them as shells of our offline presence, as the universe presented is conspicuously tactile.

The works in the exhibition which do not feature glass encased spaces still function by the same rules. The need for privacy and self-isolation is ever present and transforms a mountaintop scene into an inside-out terrarium. This space is very clearly delimitated and encloses remains of human presence. The underground basement full of air conditioners seems to suck the air from an artificially lit, barren, rocky landscape. The terrariums are an incentive to self-awareness. They present an invisible glass screen at which we are compelled to gaze hypnotically. We are presented with physicality, with tactility but we are unable to touch, making us contemplate the self-referencing nature of the paintings. The works in this exhibition function in the same way all Teleagă's paintings do, by constantly revealing, concealing and emphasizing the uncertain and the plausible.

Mircea Teleagă was born in Rădăuți, Romania, in the year of the Romanian Revolution and grew up during the uncertainty of the country's transition from communism to capitalism. After moving to London, he studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, graduating in 2016. There, Teleagă was awarded the Sarabande Lee Alexander McQueen Scholarship, having been selected for this prize by Dinos Chapman. Teleagă has participated in residency programs worldwide, including Hong Kong, Norway, and South Korea. At this point, having spent most of his life abroad, Teleagă has developed a complex identity, always addressing in his work notions of place and belonging.

Press release courtesy THEO.