META Spațiu, the contemporary art gallery based in Timișoara, Romania, is participating in Art Athina 2024, one of Europe’s longest-running and most respected art fairs, which takes place in Athens from September 19 to 23, 2024. Art Athina provides an essential platform for META Spațiu to contribute to transnational dialogues surrounding contemporary art practices, engaging with
international platforms and positioning Romanian contemporary art within broader European and global contexts.
For this edition, META Spațiu will showcase a duo exhibition, titled L’éternité en suspension, featuring the works of the Romanian artist Mathias Bar and the French artist Josèpha Blanchet, both seeking to reimagine the world and construct new mythologies in their different way.
The duo show transcends traditional artistic norms, delving into the depths of the human psyche and exploring the intricate layers of myth, identity, and transformation.
Mathias Bar embraces an introspective approach in his paintings, through which he constructs a personal mythological universe, revealing the deep layers of the human psyche and human relationships. On the other hand, Josèpha Blanchet explores the outer world through her photographic lens, transfiguring the concept of landscape to include the intimate dimension of the human body.
Josépha Blanchet’s artistic practice intricately weaves together themes of transformation mythology, and the human condition, reinterpreting classical motifs through a contemporary, introspective lens. Her work, which fuses photography and video with painterly techniques, delves into the tension between the real and the imaginary, exploring the boundary between the body and landscape, identity and transformation. In her works, the human body, particularly the female form, becomes a vast landscape—both a physical space and a psychological terrain where metamorphoses unfold.
This concept mirrors ancient Greek myths of transformation, such as the myth of Daphne, who turns into a laurel tree to escape Apollo. In Blanchet’s universe, these transformations are ongoing and reflective of the human experience, capturing moments of suspension where identity, gender, and power are in flux. Her depictions of the body floating in a non-gravitational space, seemingly in defiance of gravity, symbolize a state of transition—neither fully formed nor completely fragmented, but existing in a liminal, eternal state of becoming. In L’éternité en suspension, Josépha Blanchet’s work aligns seamlessly with the exploration of timelessness and transformation. The figures she presents hover in spaces that defy conventional boundaries, suggesting that identity, much like mythology itself, is not fixed but constantly evolving.
As contemporary myths take shape, the human body in Blanchet’s work becomes a site of endless possibility, embodying the eternal cycle of creation and destruction, of becoming and unbecoming. Through her art, Blanchet invites viewers into a suspended moment of reflection, where the past, present, and future intersect, and where myth and reality merge in the unfolding narrative of human existence.
Mathias Bar’s artistic universe delves into the complexities of human nature, intertwining themes from Greek mythology with contemporary reinterpretations of the self. His works unravel layers of the human psyche, revealing monstrous and animalistic traits, much like the mythological creatures that inhabit ancient narratives. Bar’s compositions reimagine these traditional myths, shaping new mythologies for modern times, where contemporary gods are born through our struggles with identity, power, and transformation.
The figures veiled in latex become avatars of those gods and mythical beings who concealed their true forms behind masks. The material itself suggests an interplay between strength and fragility, protection and exposure, echoing the duality of the human experience.
The fragmented, almost surreal landscapes he constructs—where human and animal figures interact—evoke a liminal space his characters inhabit both as a battlefield of identity and a place of transformation, much like the challenges faced by the gods of Olympus. These figures become metaphors for the eternal struggle of humanity to reconcile its darker, hidden instincts with desire for transcendence and purity. The tactile nature of his work invites viewers to consider the physical and psychological layers that construct our personas, while his fragmented landscapes suggest a world in perpetual motion—one where identity is constantly shifting, influenced by forces both internal and external.
L’éternité en suspension serves as a meeting point for the introspective worlds of Mathias Bar and Josépha Blanchet, creating a dialogue between inner and outer realities, between human fragility and the mythological scale of transformation.
Art Athina. International Contemporary Art Fair of Athens
19 – 23 September 2024
META Spațiu – www.metaspatiu.art
META Spațiu contemporary art gallery is a vibrant place in Romania’s contemporary cultural landscape, dedicated to the exploration and promotion of contemporary art in all its forms. With a diverse selection of works and exhibitions, META Spațiu encourages dialogue between artists and the public, providing a platform for expression and reflection. META Spațiu was founded in 2016 by Mirela Stoeac-Vlăduți, and it is a hybrid organization that functions both as an independent contemporary art gallery and as a cultural association. META Spațiu develops contemporary art projects and it laid its foundations as an artistic, curatorial, and collaborative core, which supports and presents the works of Romanian and international artists, with the intention of offering an exhaustive perspective on the artistic scene in Central and Eastern Europe. Until 2022, when it moved to its own space, META Spațiu operated as an ethereal art space, “parasitizing” other spaces – museums, galleries, public spaces – to develop collaborations, in the medium and long, with other artistic entities and actively contribute to the promotion of contemporary art and artists in various contexts. META Spațiu organized large-scale exhibitions in various spaces: museums, galleries, public spaces, and cultural centers, in Romania, but also abroad.
About Art Athina: One of the oldest art fairs in Europe, Art Athina has been active since its establishment by the Hellenic Art Galleries Association in 1993. Its strong institutional presence is realized today by the art fair itself, hosting Greek and international galleries, and by its multidisciplinary parallel activities and programming. This year’s gallery list: www.art-athina.gr