"Being familiar with all the stages of this project, I can say that now is the right time to hold this exhibition. It is like the scab which finally falls from a knee which for a long time has been waiting to flex into a new position. Galeria Posibilă integrates this muscle memory into a set-up that becomes a turning point, both in the sense of the Uniforms & Vestments project and for the trajectory of Bogdan Gîrbovan." - Michele Bressan, curator

The discussions I had with Bogdan seemed to revolve around numbers. Ten years since the project began, 23 works spread out over a 20-meter-long cord, 15 minutes in which they will be sprayed with water, 18 years since we met and eight years since I received the first work/experiment created in this way. At the time (2014-2015), Bogdan gave me the work depicting Patriarch Daniel. He gave it to me as a gift, for no particular reason, out of the blue. It was the first test, the first “washed out work?”, now a milestone on the journey that culminated in what we see this evening. It is the primordial connection I feel with these works that allows me to compose these lines, in the spirit of someone who sees themselves more in the role of an insider than a curator.

Being familiar with all the stages of this project, I can say that now is the right time to hold this exhibition. It is like the scab which finally falls from a knee which for a long time has been waiting to flex into a new position. Galeria Posibilă integrates this muscle memory into a set-up that becomes a turning point, both in the sense of the Uniforms & Vestments project and for the trajectory of Bogdan Gîrbovan.

While the images acquire a new dimensionality, through the process/performance of the blessing of the prints, Gîrbovan’s artistic career also enters a new phase: this is the first time he takes a step back from classic photography – decorous, cautious photography, displayed in the accepted manner. For the first time, Bogdan steps outside a territory with which he had probably become too familiar. He executes this forward step, in a manner that is almost grandiose, by means of a complex installation based around a ritual with multiple (implicit and resulting) performative and conceptual connotations. Through the use of running colors, Gîrbovan abandons his comfort zone, circumventing that which is deemed “proper”.

He leaves behind a well-worn approach, as if shedding dry skin, in order to process in the new “display” all the conceptual questions he had been chipping away at and had been chipping away at him in recent years. All laden with a symbolism about which countless pages of high-brow, germane commentary might well be regurgitated. Instead, I have chosen to present you with a kind of roster, a manual, albeit one that does not come with all the instructions.

More precisely: we encounter 23 photographic prints spread out along a cord in the middle of the exhibition space. These prints were blessed in advance, during a special ceremony that took place in the countryside, in the yard of the Gîrbovan family home. There, Father Popescu (who has a special relationship with the project, having had his portrait taken for the church hierarchy section) held a ceremony in which he sprayed them with water for approximately 15 minutes, until the ink they contained began to run. This ritual involved a moment of mirroring worthy of Jodorowsky when the priest came to the work depicting him and ended up blessing himself.

The particularity of this situation generates a dual axis of investigation: we explore the act of blessing, the way in which this rite becomes an almost prosaic provision of a service, one you might order, like the redecorating of a house. Besides exploring this phenomenon of banalization, we also encounter another line of investigation, one that has to do with collectable art and its mummification.

The work of an author objectively reflects their life. A life in which it is presumed the artist/human being with limited time will produce immortal works of art which, virtually and ideally, will never deteriorate. This mirage – that of immortality – ends up distracting us from the necessity of existential awareness, in the sense of becoming aware of the inevitable. It is only natural that at some point the work will also cease to exist; that its physical forms will become modified. It’s good to be able to let go. We are living at a time when immortality no longer depends on perishable materials, but on terabytes and clouds instead. Today, immortality is more a matter of electricity than it is of special paper and ink that ensure the immutability of certain qualities over a given period of time.

The concept of “forever” thus acquires a different perspective, one we are now able to separate from the palpability of traditional works. Bogdan told me a number of times that the blessing would destroy the works, only I never considered the process destructive. On the contrary, those “fifteen minutes of fame” generated by the act of blessing serve not to destroy but to transform. It is a simple and necessary act of magic, of the kind that would have left us dumbstruck as children. The water dampens the ink, altering certain forms, which transform into something new; it is like foundation makeup that is washed away to reveal the skin as it really is. If I had to define magic, I’d say it’s first and foremost an intention, one that seeks to circumvent the recognizable and the expected.

With Bogdan it is also about an alteration that removes the works from the realm of calendar and statuary deadpan photography reminiscent of Sanders. The images are taken out of an insectarium and placed into a living installation, one that even pays a visit to the world of fashion – that of everyday apparel and utility clothing, that of laundry hung out to dry. Like a weeping icon in a suburban church, Bogdan also performs a minor miracle. One that ends up questioning the very idea of the miracle in a society that longs for miracles and often even invents them. Like the blessing, the miracle now no longer seems so remote, it feels more tangible. The prints, hung from a cord held up by a piece of wood the people of Oltenia call a crăcană, greet you in the middle of the space like the circle of a traditional round dance waiting to be formed. In a process only superficially different from that employed by Dash Snow in his Glitter-Cum series (in which he ejaculates over the front pages of newspapers, altering the faces of various public figures), Bogdan also alters various important figures, questioning different dimensions and representations of power in an almost subversive enterprise. It is like a musical score, in which the rhythm generated by the sequence of works is influenced by three blank, white prints that stand in for those faces Bogdan was unable to photograph and which would have completed each of the hierarchies

These missing characters play a crucial role in Uniforms and Vestments. They are, in fact, among the most important images in the project, confirming once again that absence is often more powerful than presence. Like scarecrows or, better still, ghosts, the images, which don’t touch the floor, are suggestive of an alternative. Accepting that a work is complete often goes hand in hand with the creation of a new work, just as becoming aware of one’s own mortality (which often occurs during adolescence) always corresponds with a new stage of life. I think this will be the first in a long series of works in which we will see Bogdan experimenting. It is a unique moment in which, instead of presenting us with clear images, he invites us to squint our eyes. This reminds me of a miner (I can’t remember his name but I can still hear his voice) and how he would repeat the same phrase over and over during a visit to a mine in Petroșani: “If you squint for long enough, you’ll be able to see in the dark; if you squint for long enough, you’ll be able to see in the dark.”