”Man lives everything on the spot, for the first time and without any kind of preparation.” — Milan Kundera

Detached from the stability of referential anchors and floating in an almost a-spatial reality, where the immaterial dimension (of screens) made available proposes a replication of the self, even an encounter with the non-self, we come to know a familiar place, that un-sequenced yet distorted place, turned upside down, where events begin from the end to the beginning and continue through absence—that arbitrary void, yet full of unmaterialized potential. Waiting (perhaps for a digital Godot), reality reformats itself precisely according to this principle, in the wake of searching, of attention directed toward meaning, of a stasis—almost ontological in nature—in a physical world, listening, intuiting, cognitively navigating along coordinates that seem to be scattered in a universe without finitude.

Mentally searching for non-places that might offer coherence to identity, the body’s wholeness in fact cracks. The mental landscapes thus appropriated along liminal trajectories divert a spatialization of the self, letting it, instead, collapse under the unbearable lightness of the absurd. What Mari Hultoană manages, however, is to calibrate a simulation of slow collapse into a second-degree world without the burden of the pressure to organize meaning—for it always remains at a distance. The succumbing exposes, in exchange, with an absurd grace, the fact that waiting and absence are the real matter of our present, and not the systemic organization of everyday semantics.

The pictorial space traced by Mari, one that self-extends beyond itself, creates for the one outside the work a positioning of being surrounded by one’s own body (Maurice Merleau-Ponty). Doublings that locate their copies in non-places—such as the sequence of the artist’s mother that Google Maps, through algorithmic instantiation, tries to bring into the real plane—or that draw ontographies (Anselm Franke) through the subtle relationship between works that superimpose, frontally, the idea of the same character in a non-narrative gesture—all these scenographies simulate the volatility of certainty in order to disorganize it. In stasis, the possibility of orientation-through-subjectivation acquires an affective character, for the tracings made from an (aerial) imaginative plane in fact remain static, the gaze itself becoming a paradox. What was in motion—an affective cartography, now of a journey repeated endlessly, which Mari “closes” and parasitically fixes in another space—can only be viewed from a fixed point. Yet what has never known movement remains unbearable to look at.

Staging a dialectic of absence, Mari displays a pop-inspired gesture in which she takes an arbitrary reality and makes it self-sufficient, namely suited to evaluation according to criteria (vaguely known and often arbitrarily chosen) which, once fulfilled, give the impression of the stability of meaning. Thus, pictorial reality refuses a self-probing of its own value parameters, and also rejects the gesture of creating meaning, for in a reality where there is no weight, existence becomes volatile, devoid of ultimate consequences, and it is precisely this lack that presses as an ineffable burden.

”To have a body means to have a present.” (Henri Bergson)

Mariana Hultoană (b. 2001, Dorohoi) is a visual artist based in Iași. She completed both her BA and MA in Painting at the “George Enescu” National University of Arts and attended international painting courses in Spain. She has participated in national and international exhibitions, among them “The New Ones” at MARe – Museum of Recent Art in Bucharest, “Here and Now!” – Romanian Creative Week, and “Four Elements” (Barbagelata Foundation). Her works have been exhibited in Romania, Spain, and the USA, and in Canada she collaborated on a video art project. In 2025 she was selected for the project “Catalyst – I Believe in Romania.” Her artistic practice investigates contemporary painting as a space for reflection on silence, identity, and the absurd.