Leonard Alecu has dedicated the last 12 years to the meticulous and persistent pursuit of a single subject – the North. He is an enthusiast of the landscape, the complete opposite of the green, eternal, Mioritic landscape that we have in mind when we refer to the notion of landscape. For Alecu, the ideal landscape is abstract, black and white, almost empty, with no colour and no obvious picturesque. It is the landscape of temporary landforms created by states of aggregation of water, from liquid to steam, fog, snow and ice. There are no people, figures or beings in his photographs. A frequent visitor to the edge of the Arctic Circle, Greenland and Iceland in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2018, 2019, 2022, 2023, Leonard Alecu is nothing like those explorers who want to touch and surpass human physical performance. He has nothing athletic about him. It is not the pull of the Pole that brings him to the North, like the explorers, but the pull of the white and the empty, for the North is an exemplary, borderline case of black and white given naturally. A follower of Edward Weston’s school, Leonard Alecu sees in black and white in order to see better, more deeply – the landscape, the world, life, grandeur, disappearance. What he is aiming at has to do not with the material resistance of the human, but with the human’s resistance to immateriality. His quest is spiritual.

NORD 04 at Borderline Art Space in Iasi presents a selection of very large iconic photographs, printed by Leonard Alecu, with equipment and processes developed by him, on special Hahnemühle paper. The photographs come from his expeditions to Iceland and Greenland: huge glaciers or glacial lakes, frozen waterfalls, the raw ocean on which ever-shrinking icebergs float under the photographer’s attentive, compassionate but relentless eye, bewildering evaporations, beguiling leaks, eternal or very fresh glaciers, under which the water, transparent as a mirror, moves. A cold world, in an often sumptuous but frequently fatal movement. Risk and danger always cling to the camera lens but also to the viewer’s eye – and that’s because Leonard Alecu has never used a drone to safely approach the enormous blocks of ice that can collapse at any moment and swallow the unsuspecting observer, eager for whiteness and emptiness, who advances at any risk towards the almost inscrutable fact of disappearance and waits for days with the bulky and difficult large format camera (8×20 inches) to capture on film that single moment in which the composition of temporary relief forms reveals the timeless ideality of statements about the world, about perfection and infinity, about life and annihilation, about the human and the divine.