Heliographs based on footage from the 70s and 80s at Gaep Gallery
The exhibition “Răzvan Anton: Fading Studies” is open from February 28 to April 12 at Gaep Gallery, bringing new works made by the artist from a family collection, specifically 8mm films taken by his father in the 70s and 80s.
The footage is the basis for a substantial group of heliographs, as well as a two-channel video, “Archival Study (Places and Portraits)”, which will be screened in the gallery. This is the artist’s third solo exhibition at the Gaep.
After several years of working with public archives such as the Minerva Press Photo Archive, Răzvan Anton began in 2022 to analyze images from his family collection. The works in the exhibition exemplify this shift in his practice. He continues to use a heliographic technique to uncover, somewhat paradoxically, a hidden meaning on the surface of old images. Anton begins by hatching the sheets of paper with a blue ballpoint pen, then overlays a transparent screen with the negative of the chosen photograph or film frame, and finally exposes them to sunlight on the studio windows. In a slow process that takes weeks or months, depending on the season, the sun develops the image, explains curator Mihaela Chiriac.
Like the heliographs, the video “Archival Study (Places and Portraits)” is based on 8mm footage of the father. Anton treated this private material in a similar way to the public archives he had previously worked with. Like an archivist who labels and classifies, he organized the footage into two categories: places and portraits. However, he lets the categories overlap and inevitably appear in both sides of the video installation. “Landscapes, gardens, houses, houses, faces, bodies belong to the same lived reality – mixed, disorganized, tangled. In front of this work, the eye and the mind are free to roam, seduced by the intimate appearance of old footage,” says Mihaela Chiriac.
About Răzvan Anton
Răzvan Anton (b. 1980, lives and works in Cluj-Napoca) graduated with an MA in Drawing from Camberwell College of Arts in London, after undergraduate and MA studies at the University of Art and Design in Cluj-Napoca.
His work has been included in exhibitions at MGML – Match Gallery (Ljubljana, 2021), Motorenhalle/riesa efau (Dresden, 2019), Politecnico di Milano – Galleria del Progetto (Milan, 2019), the 15th edition of the Havana Biennial (2024) and the Art Encounters Biennial (Timisoara, 2017), among other venues.
Prior to Fading Studies (2025), Gaep presented two solo exhibitions of his work: “Studies of Gaze” (2020) and “Mnemonics” (2015). Anton was artist-in-residence at MuseumsQuartier in Vienna and at the House next to the Synagogue, Mediaș, as part of the project “Absence as Heritage/TRACES”.
