In doing so, Horațiu Șovăială’s visual vocabulary relies on communist artifacts that were rehabilitated and reused and updated, or post-communist ones that have replaced the former signs of power: when taken together, however, they collectively signify not just the zeitgeist of an era that we are arguably still living in, but also how meta-narratives, such as politics or history, permeate the everyday. An everyday seen from below, with formerly unknown protagonists that the artist brings to the foreground.
Without providing answers with regards to this transition — where are we headed and how long does it take us to get there? (but never seeking to do so in the first place) — the series rather maps out a metamorphosis. A moment in historical time just like any other that is preceded by one era and followed by another; a moment that is temporarily obscured by the shadows of grand historical narratives of imagined triumphs, by deceptions, absurdities, or mere coincidences. What is striking though in this amalgamation of signs is an idiosyncratic state of in-betweenness: a constant process of grappling and coming to terms with what is hidden behind these shadows.
What the imagery does is to go back in history in search of lost memories and souvenirs. These are not dead, but not fully alive either, yet somewhere in between awaiting to be unearthed from the pile of debris that has collected over them. In the horizon of the century without a future, the series promises the inevitability of change: it gives away the possibility that the arrival of light creeping between the obscuring shadows is unavoidable, an organic stage of a metamorphosis whose subjects are not political leaders, important figures, or human beings in the first place, but memories that are materialized in multilayered forms and shapes.
(Petrică Mogo
ș, 2021)