It was the Night of the Galleries weekend when I was urged to go to the “für papier und orchester” exhibition by Bogdan Rața, and when he said it was one not to be missed in that entire cluster of exhibitions, I told myself I had to go, because, coming from him, it meant something. The exhibition contains both works by Emilian Pospaii, as well as samples, artifacts or typographic instruments selected, cut and interpreted by Nicoleta Radu, with the ambition of a total installation, which it seems to succeed for them. Looking at it from a distance, without physically approaching the objects, you could not easily tell which are the artistic artifacts and which are the typographic ones. This is also because the mechanical objects come from an almost obsolete era, having that charm of the unfamiliar, which gives them an aesthetic aura that allows them to merge with the works.

An interdisciplinary exhibition with a clear theme, approached both in a pseudo-documentary and interpretive, poetic manner. In itself, such an exhibition typology is still rare for our art scene, perhaps because it involves collaborations with institutions and specialists (also in this case), increased attention to the conservation of artifacts and adapted exhibition methods, therefore a high production time and cost. In this context, we cannot fail to mention “THE TWIST. Five Provincial Stories from an Empire”, curated by Călin Dan and Celia Ghyka, as one of the most ambitious projects of recent years in this direction.

In contrast to the frozen calm of the edges of paper, stencils, frames, and typographic tools, Emilian Pospaii’s line is fluid and disruptive, distinctly scratched — that is, human, like a stitch. The drawings are made in ink on paper or on a screen printing sieve, sometimes intermedially, traced like seismograph lines on volumetric installations composed of stacks of paper cut into angular shapes, or, at the opposite pole of volume, of simple white spaces that occupy the invisible negative of an embossing stamp.

These media and mountings, including the tapestries that also imitate the drawn line, seem to subsume imagistically a typology of ornamentation, as elements coming from pre-modern print — cursive, flourishing & expansive. The lines are abstracted, and sometimes, in the corner of the composition, they become blank verses or aphorisms. Emilian Pospaii’s poetic background is also visible here, showing that, unlike the regular rigidity of typographical molds, handwriting, the drawn line, are idiosyncratically influenced by the mood. The mountings are functional (screen printing sieve, paper stacks), in opposition to the expressive nature of the line. I was particularly intrigued by the framing of some drawings — embossing stamp on paper — in passepartouts, like technical files. In addition, the mechanical devices on display, although they betray the aesthetic of the utilitarian, are nevertheless poetically corroded both by the patina of time and usage, and by the aura of strangeness mentioned at the beginning.

The drawings, processual exercises on the border between a structuralist and an expressive medium, follow the first postulate of El Lissitzky’s manifesto, “Topography of Typography” (1923): «Economy of expression — optics instead of phonetics.». The images sometimes become motifs reminiscent of the morphological fantasies of cartography or seismographs, sometimes they slide towards the figurative, but treated with the same processual pleasure of using a material to cover a surface. We also encounter tapestries made on silk with a cangiante effect that make an interesting contrast with the standardised line of the dominant black and white, an effect like the sparkle on the patinated metal of the worn-out stencils.

The atmosphere seems to exude a mechanical intimacy of the latest technologies from the age of steel and alloys, the one before silicone, an amniotic smell of ink on paper in a room faded to the white of an empty sheet, where only the machines hum monotonously, at regular intervals. An air of a posthuman landscape. Or rather nonhuman. Basically, the exhibition is dedicated to the very technology that first replaced one of the defining cognitive functions of the human species, memory. Maybe that’s why I chose the title with a hint of apocalypse-in-the-making, borrowed from Claudiu Komartin’s volume Cobalt, which resonates with the same note of requiem present in the title of the exhibition.

„für papier und orchester”. Authors: Emilian Pospaii — poet and illustrator; Nicoleta Radu / Fabrik — typographer. Romanian Creative Week [National Museum of Art of Romania, Bucharest, 03–09.10 2025]