Warped Space: Continuous Cities
Vladimir Florentin’s Solo Show at Camera
What is your unrealized project? Swiss curator and art historian Hans Ulrich Obrist has always been open about his habit of asking this one simple question to each and every artist he has worked with, in order to fulfill his curatorial duties of making the impossible possible[1]. When it comes to Vladimir Florentin’s latest exhibition at Camera, I was pleasantly surprised to find out that Warped Space: Continuous Cities represents just that – an unrealized project that finally had the chance to be materialized, a solo show that was meant to take over an entire space and make it its own – from the red tape that traces its way on the gallery’s door, to the maximum use of its three walls and floor, Vladimir manages to break the barriers of photography and immerse the viewer in a variety of urban landscapes that don’t seem to “sit still”.
The space – from white cube to industrial site
Camera is an artist-run space in Cluj-Napoca, created by Irina Dumitrașcu Măgurean, that focuses on displaying contemporary Romanian art photography. Consisting of three white walls, two large windows and a glass door with an Yves Klein blue frame, the small gallery gives carte blanche to artists to manipulate the place in whatever way fits their works’ narrative best – and that is exactly what Vladimir did. Therefore, the first impression given by Florentin’s Warped Space is that of a gesamtkunstwerk, a concept coming from the field of aesthetics and often used in relation to the Art Nouveau/ Arts and Crafts/ Secession movement from the 1900s, meaning a “total work of art”, in which every detail is tied to each other and contributes to the overall image of an art piece[2].
In a subtle way, the artist’s first step into this direction is the aforementioned red tape on the entrance to the gallery, already creating a connection between the outside and the inside. The floor, on the other hand, with the help of red, green and silver tape, has been transformed into a grid map, similar to what we would see on Google Maps, giving us the feeling that we’re on the road to urban exploration. Each of the three walls represents one city – Hackney Wick (neighbourhood in London), Arles and Sinaia – and is covered in a different material that you would usually find on a construction site, such as isoprene, black plastic wrap and orange fiberglass mesh. To further immerse the viewer into the atmosphere of a place that’s under constant renovation, the materials are fixed on the wall with green, black and yellow, and red tape.
More than a view/ A fine line to sculpturality
Vladimir Florentin’s method of work brings us to a new experimental phase in the world of art photography, one that desires to leave two-dimensionality on the side and treat photography as an expandable element that can no longer be detained inside a frame. In an interview with Laura Bivolaru, Vladimir describes his works as photo-objects, meaning “pieces that occupy the space between image and sculpture”[3] and that have the ability to capture the dynamism, loudness and the overwhelming nature of a space that is always changing due to human intervention, whether it be industrialization or tourism. This is also why the artist is not keen on using the usual photographic paper, but instead prefers printing his images on metal plates or other similar materials that he can later cut, shape or bend. As auxiliaries, Vladimir resorts to found objects that better fit the aesthetics and concept of his shows, in this case polystyrene blocks, Rigips profiles and even towel holders.
Starting with the Hackney Wick wall, the viewer is greeted by a place whose history has been deeply touched by industrialization and which, to this day, still seems to be in a permanent state of renovation. Images of buildings under construction are given a more nuanced significance by the way they’ve been reshaped, giving you the feeling that they are invading your personal space, while the cut-out pictures, inspired by American artist Gordon Matta-Clark, reflect the loss of community at the hands of capitalism. The last remnants of nature are represented by a bent picture of a red rose, on the lower side of the wall, symbolically surrounded, and therefore protected, by black and yellow tape.
The middle wall, corresponding to Arles, overlaps elements from the distant past, such as the city’s Roman ruins, with contemporary (and sometimes unconventional) artistic practices, like graffiti. In a fashionable Pop art manner, oversaturating the chromatic palette, Vladimir creates a collage that consists of cut-out letters from commercial settings, buildings in construction, landscapes that you would usually find on a postcard and street art. Past and present seem to meet again in the bright blue glyphs that adorn some of the images – while they may look like they could be part of an ancient tribe’s writing system, the glyphs are actually repurposed and refurbished shadows of metal structures captured by the artist on the streets of Arles.
Sinaia surprises us with a much different approach, connecting, in a paradoxical way, personal nostalgia with objective methods of visual documentation – aerial views taken from surveillance cameras and satellite images. Unlike the other two walls, Sinaia extends beyond its “border” and invades Arles’ space, marking its new territory with a red spray-painted X, just like on a treasure map – is this where memory ends or begins? This time, pictures are jumping out of their frames, thus creating two separate pieces with two possible meanings: the borders, representing the original context of the memory, and the core, the memory itself, readjusting its position and seeking out new ways of being. Propped up on a pipe with a faucet[4], we have a cut-out from a picture found on the Hackney Wick wall (shaped similarly to the Fibonacci sequence), detail that I personally believe perfectly captures the title and the essence of the show: the cities were always meant to be in a constant state of communication, as the cities are continuous among each other and through each other.
What we see at Camera is an in-depth analysis of a post-industrial world, where material elements lay as witnesses, but also casualties, of the consequences of human intervention – abandoned factories, buildings always under construction, walls covered in street art, commercials at every step. As we enter the gallery, we are taken over by an overwhelming feeling of claustrophobia, as the cities, in their never-ending process of transformation, keep growing towards us, giving us no choice but to contemplate what our place is in this amalgam of change. Through his photo-objects and his ability to integrate found objects in a way that better highlights the concept of his show, Vladimir Florentin manages to capture the chaotic movement of the urban landscape and not only: in his own words, “Warped Space: Continuous Cities doesn’t document urban change – it hallucinates it, performs it, overheats inside it”.
– by Timea Toth
[1] Hans Ulrich Obrist. Ways of Curating, Penguin Books, 2015, p. 8.
[2] Ada Ștefănuț. Arta 1900 în România, București: Noi Media Print, 2008, p. 9.
[3] Laura Bivolaru. “Photography: from material to monument. Conversation between Laura Bivolaru and Vladimir Florentin”, accessed 18 March 2025. https://www.photographyinflux.ro/po_item/laura-bivolaru-x-vladimir-florentin/
[4] The pipe is part of the gallery’s structure, but it worked very well in the artist’s favour.
