Cutting the Clouds with a Hand Saw

Dani Ghercă merges creative thinking and the managerial approach in all the stages of his endeavour – trying to map a visual territory with both the consistency and apparent objectivity of cartography and also with the subversive abstraction of social and mystical utopia. Performing with ease and on tiptoe in the turbulent waters of international art, Dani Ghercă has demonstrated from his debut an austere tension, being some sort of subterranean missionary in the service of revelation. Under the guise of a small-steps strategy there is an obsessive pursuit of what is not there, of what has not been revealed yet.

“I ceased to believe in the ability of photography to represent reality”, the artist declared emphatically, drawing a simple and straightforward parallel between the painting crisis caused by the apparition of analogue photography in the nineteenth century, and the photography crisis determined by the rise of digital culture and social media in the twenty-first century.

In this instance, Dani Ghercă demonstrates a strong curatorial approach: the space in the photographs spreads out in the exhibition and the exhibition space enters the photographs. Photography needs to be perceived from the virtual point of view of the place where it was taken, and this perception is filtered through the way a viewer feels the real space where it is displayed. Therefore, this intersection of subjectivities becomes part of the final work. Visiting the exhibition is an experience that does not ensue relaxation and cultural hedonism, but rather a physical clash with the works instead of a distant, purely visual one.

The Continuous Flow project started in Berlin in late 2019, while Dani Ghercă was working on an art research about the infamous Berlin Wall. In an attempt to add more flexibility to the mapping, the artist chose to rent a helicopter and this led to the revelation of a fortunate combination: the sunset light, the modernist architecture featuring metal roofs and the strange angles that were accessible only from a flying machine. “I don’t understand what I’m looking at” is paramount to induce an alienation process in the value system of the audience, an alienation that reproduces the feelings of the artist when facing a metropolis and answers the flattening and loss of identity of this global city that looks the same regardless of where it actually is.

In this project Dani Ghercă aims to create the last metaphor of globalization, a world atlas of those cities that are now visually resembling computer motherboards, this element that is controlling the existence of humanity as a whole every minute. The technological break in Dani Ghercă’s anti-vedute is probably one of the most recent manifestations of this primary skepticism regarding the axiological value of human condition. Dani Ghercă attempts to make a grand escape – with practical discretion – wearing the heroic apparel of an anonymous Blade Runner who is chasing the globalization spectre in a context we can only glimpse fragments of.