Clouds, trees, snow, houses live separate lives, as files live in an archive, between description and lack of discerning. These common elements are invested with enough matter, strangeness and weight to create a winter scenery of oneiric quality, using the static as impulse for the recollection of movement.

 

Raluca Popa's installation at sandwich transfers the fairy-tale quality of a childhood poem into a layered image, using an arrangement that vaguely recalls the method of traditional animation, with which the artist is very familiar. Since 2009, alongside her artistic practice, Raluca Popa has also been working as a background artist, thus continuously shifting positions in-between the two poles, the foreground and the subordinated décor. More recently, she surprisingly found herself moving works from the folder of ‘background art’ and using them as material for art projects, like this one.  

 

Two men are caught in a surprising dance, or embrace. They retain the unexpected behavior of children in the poem, playing in the snowy landscape: “One man has just lifted the other one up and is turning him in open air around his body. In my mind, the couple resembles a hammer thrower, an instant before the hammer is thrown and breaks through the air and into the glass panels.” (R.P.)

 

 

^ Iarna pe uliță, written in 1896 by George Coșbuc is a poem describing and praising rural life in winter; it is generally taught, in a short version, in primary school.