Optical Landscape is yet another work resulting from an interest in the peculiarities of optics. In this case, the artist uses a Zerodur lens that splits the beam of light used by high-performance telescopes. Under the lens is a landscape photograph of Greece’s southernmost continental point, Cape Tenaro. Depending on the angle you look, something else becomes visible.

For the Photoelastic Stress Glass Plate Mountain series, the artist purchased online and used archival images from a collection of glass negatives of the Pyrenees Mountains taken by amateur explorers on their hikes in the 1930s and 1950s. The work applies photoelasticity, a materials science technique that measures the stress a piece of material has been subjected to. Scientists use a polarizer to capture an image of the internal stress the material under study is undergoing. For example, in the automotive industry, this technique is used to analyze parts for impact loading. When a similar force as in a crash is applied to a body corner, by observing the colors that emerge in the presence of polarizing light, engineers can note the areas of higher stress, i.e. areas that can lead to deformation or breakage of the part. Stress cannot be placed on glass negatives because they would shatter, so Plătică scanned the images along with a series of special polarizing fiber filters with tensioned plastic. From these tension recordings of the landscapes, it would appear as if the aurora borealis had poured over the Pyrenean mountain night (one of the pictures has the following note on the flyover: Punta Alta) or the whole landscape had taken on the most unexpected colors. The superimposition comes as a reversal of one’s perception of what is real, hinting at the insertion of an element of chaos that makes one convince oneself that it is something other than what one sees, or doubt one’s own understanding, like a magic trick or an instance of psyop, as disseminated by one of Plătică’s favorite artists, Trevor Paglen.

The colored circles in the Isochromatic Fringe Maps are resin-sheathed discs from the materials science department at the Technical University of Cluj. The disks were used as teaching materials to explain thermal photoelasticity to students. They were subjected to the thermal elasticity process, then placed in an oven and the molecular structure of the material changed. The next step was to photograph the tension lines created inside the resin as a result of the elasticity.

Photoelasticity can also be found in Photoelastic Parameter Panorama. There are two components to the work: the negative image, scanned from the Pyrenees photo archive, at the top, and at the bottom is a piece of resin subjected to photoelasticity and what looks like an anamorphosis of this landscape, but where all the tension in the material is visible.

Orion Nebula Map after Henry Draper’s Capture contains a 0.1 mm thick plate of framed glass, twice as thin as a sheet of paper, perhaps the thinnest glass in the world. Whole or simply stippled laser cut-outs reproduce the first photograph ever taken of a constellation, the Orion constellation, by the American physician and amateur astronomer Henry Draper in 1880. Draper’s widow, Mary Anna Draper, wanted to continue researching the stars, being among the founders of the Mount Wilson Observatory and the one who funded much of the Harvard women’s research. Until recently, the position of curator of these plates was supported from the original legacy left by Anna Draper. There is a rather close connection between that photograph of the constellation Orion and everything that took place at Harvard, through the philanthropy of the wife who believed the research should be continued.

Birefringent Slow Glass Archive is based on Northern Irish sci-fi writer Bob Shaw’s short story, Light of Other Days. It centers around slow glass, which, depending on its thickness, causes light to pass from one side to the other in years, even decades in the case of one piece of glass. This means that anyone looking through the piece of glass will see events from the past that they experience in the present.

“The most important effect, in the eyes of the average individual, was that light took a long time to pass through a sheet of slow glass. A new piece was always jet black because nothing had yet come through, but one could stand the glass beside, say, a woodland lake until the scene emerged, perhaps a year later. If the glass was then removed and installed in a dismal city flat, the flat would – for that year – appear to overlook the woodland lake. During the year it wouldn’t be merely a very realistic but still picture – the water would ripple in sunlight, silent animals would come to drink, birds would cross the sky, night would follow day, season would follow season. Until one day, a year later, the beauty held in the subatomic pipelines would be exhausted and the familiar gray cityscape would reappear”.^[1]

The ability of slow glass to preserve pleasant moments comes not only with the peace it offers, but also with the anguish of the memory. At the same time, glass can also store unpleasant memories. In any case, it can be associated with the inability to make emotional progress. Lining Shaw’s storytelling is a blurring of the boundary between projection and reality and a questioning of how real a technology-mediated experience is. Past events lose the “plastic” quality they would take on as memory, the organicity of memory being blurred by the rigidity of technology, however finely honed. The driving force of the story is the transient nature of beauty associated with the desire to preserve defining moments, and the price that comes with fulfilling that desire in the face of inevitable change. Plătică adds large pieces of glass, suggesting that the photographed landscape arrives here after a long time on the other side, using two pieces of UV printed glass. Depending on how the light shines throughout the space, the observable focus in the landscape shifts, with some places becoming brighter or darker, implying that the image in the work would be imprinted over a year. The work employs ideas from the rest of the exhibition in a single piece, such as the fact that it is composed of a duplication, or the application of a filter to break down the light spectrum, or yet another diffraction grid. Another element that touches on directions already present in the exhibition is the shape of the object: it is inspired by archival instrumentation, referring to the glass plates used in spectroscopy by Harvard researchers. It gives the impression that light can actually be preserved and studied like in an archive. Light becomes a stored substance to reveal the past. The striking idea of the work is the property it implies to have in common with the stars ever so present in the exhibition, that of light that existed long ago but is only now present.

After viewing the exhibition one can only be left with a qualia that runs through the whole spectrum of light. Sometimes, when I long to feel something pleasant, the memory of Plătică’s colors comes to mind. While the effect of a small burst of successive gradients is compelling to assess the exhibition in positive terms, perhaps even more so than in previous exhibitions, I feel that the photographic medium alone (and the gesturality of the objects with which they are associated or become themselves) falls short of what it could be. Given his extensive discourse on light, Plătică should be using more of light itself rather than its simulation. I’d like to see him evolve into more elaborate installations that incorporate some of the things he’s talking about, in one way or another, beyond a flat surface or a static situation. As a direction that comes most readily to mind would be Pierre Huyghe’s work Offspring (2018) in the “Liminal” (2024) exhibition at Punta della Dogana, in which beams of light in several colors, with smoke and a scent influenced by sensors that detected movement in the room, emerged from two boxes, paired with the music of Erik Satie. I offer this example because it’s a kind of art in motion, transforming from one moment to the next, like the very nature that the artist immortalizes, simulates, but does not deliver without creating another. Although the aim of the exhibition is linked to the notion of archive, of ‘freezing’ the transformable, I would like to see Plătică’s art subject to verbs of motion. I feel that the territory opened up by Plătică would be vaster than what it offers, and I can only hope for its evolution towards more spectacular forms.