Dana Cojbuc — Out in here — Catherine Putman Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Ends in 29 days: November 9 → December 21, 2024

For her first solo exhibition at the gallery, Dana Cojbuc has chosen to bring together various series that she has been working on since 2019, along with many new artworks.

After developing a body of photographic work for several years now, Dana Cojbuc is currently undertaking a singular and sensitive transition towards drawing. During an artistic residency at the Sunnhorland Museum in Norway in 2019, she passed from a purely photographic approach to a drawn vision of landscape.

Based on her own prints, the artist extrapolates, redefining the limits and reinventing the subject through drawing. The border between photography and the charcoal work is a subtle, mysterious one and paves the way to imaginary locations. This extension acts as a revelator of the graphic and artistic character of the real landscape, in which she occasionally intervenes beforehand, in the manner of a Land Art artist.

Dana Cojbuc grew up in a small village in Romania and her relationship to nature is profoundly marked by this rural childhood. She brings a poetic gaze to bear on the landscape, playing with it and not hesitating to “stage” or present it in particular ways. Sometimes she moves or adds elements within the frame: tree trunks, branches, flour.
Her physical involvement is central to her practice. On foot or by bicycle, she roams through forests, along shorelines, riverbanks and paths, with remarkable endurance. She breathes in the scents, looking, searching, sensing.

Dana Cojbuc places the question of composition at the heart of her exhibition. Her mastery is immediately perceptible: in the shooting, the choice of formats, the balance between the space reserved for the photographic image, the drawing, and the whiteness of the paper. The wide variety of formats and recurrence of the images presented in diptychs are key aspects of her creations.

She reworks images from the founding Yggdrasil series (2019), some of which were never shown and that she would now like to present in a little archipelago of suspended miniatures. Out of a concern for contrasts, she is preparing large formats, landscapes from various regions that she wants to bring together by drawing over the artworks, but also directly onto the walls.

This desire to combine images highlights the imaginary dimension of her work. The reunion — through drawing — of landscapes captured in Romania, Provence, the Landes region of southwest France, Basque Country, Normandy, and Norway help us to travel beyond a geographic reality, like a borderless landscape. While the idea of keeping the photographic memory of certain places is at work, it isn’t a nostalgic quest that guides the artist. It is more about letting Platonic or more personal reminiscences emerge. The drawing then settles into the wide margins, the blanks are designed to evoke open-ended incompleteness, like an invitation to a stroll through an evolving world, to roam.