Working with the medium of fine art photography Roxana Savin creates narratives in which elements interact and form complex, often dreamlike relationships. The artist’s first solo show in Romania presents works from her latest three projects combined into a single metafictional statement in which the artist invites the viewer to a journey across the natural landscape, where the physical coexists with the intangible and perception of time is suspended. Inspired by the essays of American writer William H. Gass, the exhibition’s title evokes questions on interpretation of reality, perceiving the present, and relations between actors in global art processes.

Fiction and the Figures of Life opens with images from the series Stillness and Dark Matter, spacious, pure landscapes, devoid of any sign of human presence, that are reduced to the fundamental elements of composition: line, color and light. These minimalistic images convey a balanced, and at the same time, ambiguous visual and sensory experience, and inspire the viewer towards aesthetic meditation and immersion. The images require and embody a lasting view, not only in terms of the multitude of representation, but also in their very density, the accumulation of thin, translucent layers of different shades of whiteness and blackness. A fragile division, like a horizon line, goes straight through the image, from one edge to the other, building the dramaturgy of the exhibition and leading the viewer’s path through the gallery space.

In Daydream, nature transforms into a fanciful environmental narrative on behalf of the hero, perhaps the author, who has returned to the city of childhood. In a vivid surreal adventure, the landscape keeps mysteries behind what is apparent. Imaginative connotations are assigned to mundane objects. The sense of time and place disappears completely, challenging one’s existing habits of readings images, gestures and situations.