Cristian Avram. Look out, see in

Boccanera Gallery is pleased to present Look out, see in, a solo exhibition by the Romanian artist Cristian Avram. The exhibition is hosted in the exhibition spaces of Boccanera Gallery Milano and will be on view from 24 November 2023 to 13 January 2024.
On the occasion of the exhibition, Tracey Snelling's work Chongqing Nights from Studio la Città in Verona will be hosted, thanks to the collaboration between the two galleries. 
 
 
Look out, see in proposes an organic and comprehensive overview of Cristian Avram's research and practice, analysing more closely the continuous presence of specific iconographic themes in his works, which could be qualified as leitmotifs.
 
Through the playful pun in its title, the exhibition Look out, see in analyses the use of doors, windows and mirrors in the Romanian artist's painting practice.
These iconographic elements metaphorically exemplify the threshold between the private and public dimensions, a limit beyond which the Elsewhere and the Other open up, and physical dimensions against which human imagination, dream and fantasy are projected.
In their being suspended between reality, dream, and psyche, Avram employs doors, windows, and mirrors as real and imaginary instruments for determining a refined choice of colour and, precisely from the latter, a peculiar light effectwithin the work. Thanks to specific colour choices and glazes, Cristian Avram determines interesting light effects that move from the icy twilight atmospheres from outside to the soothing warmth evoked by the domestic and familiar environment.
In his works, Avram condenses personal experiences and memories, framing them in sophisticated geometric compositions with a traditional pictorial cut, in which these iconographic elements play a fundamental role. They represent concrete and partly ancestral - almost magical - gateways between this world and the hereafter and a direct exemplification of the artist's gaze. In this sense, doors, windows and mirrors qualify as places of the gaze, through which the general metaphysical atmosphere in the artist's works is enhanced: these optical devices record and are themselves legacies of human presence and absence, signs of everyday life and experience.
 
In the face of their allegorical significance, in Avram's works these elements appear as a metaphorical reminder to modern man, a memento to the crumbling of his certainties, reducing reality to perceptual fragments.
Following the footsteps of the modernist pictorial tradition of René Magritte and Edward Hopper, Avram seems to recover an intrinsic sense of estrangement and unease that characterises these iconographic elements and, through whose vision, reality qualifies as an intricate enigma without solution. Through these glimpses, Avram's characters seem suspended and in the act of questioning their own existence, giving substance to their loneliness.
 
These elements of the gaze simultaneously underscore a contemporaneity modus operandi and a specific view of the world, a dividing line between what we think and see, a point toward which opposing and conflicting forces converge and find the right balance in the frame. Doors, windows and mirrors act as filters and fractures that open onto the visible by giving us back our personal reworking of reality, our poetic universe, our feeling of life.
 
text curated by Eva Adduci

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