“The Shape of Else” by Victor Andrei Ionescu
Bucharest, MoBU (International Art Fair of Bucharest), 2025
co-curated by Andreea-Eliza Petrov and Daniel Loagăr
I curate exhibitions that explore how images carry meaning beyond what is immediately visible, bringing together works that resonate on both an emotional and symbolic level.
”The series of works presented in The Shape of Else weaves, through a refined visual poetry, a universe in which seemingly disparate registers—figures, animals, sacred symbols, still life, architectural fragments—are subtly bound into a profound coherence. Here, the sacred, the mystical, the magical, and the profane do not exclude one another, but coexist naturally, in tension and balance.
Transfigured interiors and landscapes become permeable spaces between the real and the visionary. Within them, human, animal, or symbolic presences drift between domestic tenderness and archetypal mystery. Everything transforms into markers of a fluid spirituality, situated at the threshold between everyday experience and poetic revelation.
The artist operates with a malleable freedom, and his compositional eclecticism reveals expressionist and fauvist approaches, drawing from surrealist aesthetics, at times skirting the grotesque through affective distortions with naïve inflections. Birds acquire spiritual attributes, the personal dog becomes both witness and symbol, and human figures are treated at times ritually, at others almost cinematically. Objects turn into emotional relics. The settings—spaces of reverie or evocations of the invisible—carry echoes of spiritism, memory, and an imaginary realm in which reality unfolds into layers.
The works refuse any strict separation between the religious and the secular, between the aesthetic and the affective. They propose a personal liturgy of images, where transcendence is only insinuated, and the everyday is imbued with ritual weight. In this deeply subjective visual universe, everything becomes language: color, gesture, the thickness of the pictorial layer, the placement of an object, the presence of a shadow.
The exhibition invites a quiet yet unsettling contemplation of what may lie beyond appearances: traces, spirits, symbols, subtle presences. It is an aesthetics of fertile ambiguity, of the delicate resonance between the material and the spiritual, between gesture and meaning.”
Andreea-Eliza Petrov