Getting Lost In Time

The current solo exhibition of Alin Carpen at Scemtovici & Benowitz Gallery brings together eight medium- and large-scale sculptural installations, forming a retrospective that includes older works, recent pieces, and some shown for the first time. The path through the exhibition does not follow a chronological or narrative order, but is instead shaped in response to the gallery’s space.

The works are arranged like a memory puzzle, akin to a map that charts time, transience, and destruction. The exhibition’s structure reflects the concept of poesis, as defined by Aristotle — the act of creating something new, something that did not exist before. Through this lens, the artist expresses himself via an original creative process that surpasses mere imitation of reality, giving life to new meanings and inner spaces born of introspection. It is a narrative in which his background as an architect-engineer is “surpassed” by metaphor and sensitivity. In his vision, sculpture becomes a focused meditation on matter, memory, and artistic trace — he does not work with spectacle, but with the density of form and conceptual content that holds within itself narrative.

Alin Carpen employs meticulously constructed ready-made objects, challenging perceptions of reality by filtering them through a personal lens of memory. Behind each piece lies a story that transcends its central concept. His art bridges the initial idea and the narrative that emerges as materials interact and combine. The works, though technically precise, remain open, inviting contemplation and the viewer’s own interpretation. Between two breaths, between two mirroring surfaces, time slips in — along with the day, and death.

Carpen brings together four recurring elements in his creative universe: iron, water, fire, and image. The mirror becomes a gateway, a tool of memory meant to unsettle perception and place the viewer in the midst of their own impermanence.

Interweavings of elements and matter unfold: mirrors endlessly reflecting from one abyss to another; charred wood columns salvaged from the architectural remains of the historic Assan Mill in Bucharest, ravaged by arson; massive chunks of rusted iron; coal from fires; black silk lungs pulsating with a breath of death, caught between two heartbeats of an iron ogre. A bolt of lightning, frozen in the metal of a sculptural column; water dripping among memory-photographs, only to evaporate instantly with a hiss of steam, evoking the indifference of space-time toward our passing through the world. All these become symbols of a city, at times in ruin, speaking of life, death, and disappearance.

Time and figures are endlessly mirrored and multiplied, and the sculptures — constructed from heavy, sometimes menacing materials, powerful and antagonistic — are transformed through their “interior design” into poetic, metaphorical spaces, into installations charged with meaning and story. The symbolic, mysterious key portraits speak of lost memory and the identities of those who are no longer among us, wrapped in secrecy. Memories are embodied in a kinetic installation activated by the presence of the viewer, vintage milk bottles encasing photographs of the departed (Where are those who are no longer with us?) — a synesthetic metaphor for the passage of time. Sic transit gloria mundi, in motion.

Knives reflect a thought on threat and the imminence of danger, the tension of a moment that could erupt at any time. The sculptural-installation spaces unfold rhythmically: the drop falling onto heated metal, the key that activates a portrait, the trembling cord, the photographs that move as someone nears. The work speaks of repetition and cyclicality, of the fascination of losing oneself in the image, in the depths, in the reverse of the (in)visible.

In works such as The Destruction of the City, The Breath of Death, The Instant, Key Portraits, Evaporation, and Solitude, the titles are not merely descriptive or mimetic — they open up sensitive narratives about disappearance, the fragility of the present, and collective loss. As Foucault said, the mirror is simultaneously a real place and a place of illusion — to be and not to be at the same time — a constellation of objects and gestures evoking not so much what once was, but what is on the verge of disappearing, the now-memories. Carpen’s sculptures become moments between two breaths, a gaze existing between two heartbeats.

— Curator Raluca Ilaria Demetrescu