Show dates: July 17—Aug 14
Opening: July 16, 6-8 pm
"A Line in Use" is a project initiated by Ivan Gallery and Fragment Gallery, bringing together Romanian artists Giulia Crețulescu, Gavril Pop, Adrian Ganea, Dan Beudean, Simona Runcan, and Ivana Mladenović in an intergenerational investigation of geometry as both formal language and political condition. If modernism imagined geometry as a stable grammar of order, rationality, and universality, "A Line in Use" begins from the suspicion that no form is ever neutral, and no abstraction ever untouched by the conditions that produce it. We inherit the fantasy that lines clarify, that structure brings coherence, that abstraction somehow exists outside history, untouched by conflict, desire, or consequence. Yet every form carries with it a decision, and every decision leaves something outside its frame.
Here / not here. Included / not included. Inside / outside. Form / formless. Figure / ground. Order / excess. Rule / residue. Included / expelled. Held / dropped. Drawn / erased.
These are descriptions of the world.
So the question is not what is a line, but what does a line keep insisting is not there. Before it becomes artistic form, the line marked a threshold, a border, a division. And what it divides does not stay silent. "A Line in Use" asks what happens when formal systems begin to fail under the pressure of ecological collapse, accelerated technological mediation, and increasingly fragmented political realities. And perhaps what begins to appear is not the end of order, but its instability from the beginning: that every line drawn to organize the world simultaneously produces the place where the world does not stay organized, where it slips, returns, resists, or simply refuses to remain inside.
Text by Daniela Custrin
Giulia Crețulescu works through acts of ontological displacement, constructing hybrid ergonomic objects that resist stable categorization and refuse immediate functionality. Her practice exposes the distinction between image and object, body and representation, producing entities suspended in states of limbo. What emerges is a form of material estrangement in which objects cease to perform their assigned identities and instead become interruptions within established systems of meaning, fragments operating outside recognizable taxonomies.
Adrian Ganea investigates the increasingly unstable boundary separating fiction from material reality under conditions of technological acceleration. Moving between sculpture, digital animation, and scenography, his work explores how contemporary subjectivity is produced through synthetic environments, mediated experiences, and speculative infrastructures. Technology appears here not as a neutral tool but as an active force generating new ontologies, new forms of perception, and new regimes of reality itself.
Dan Beudean constructs dense visual systems where mythology, ecological anxiety, historical violence, and contemporary political tensions coexist without hierarchy. Working primarily through drawing and installation, his practice reveals the unstable coexistence between the everyday and the uncanny, exposing how collective imaginaries are shaped by structures that operate beneath the visible surface of ordinary life. His works inhabit precisely that contradictory space where history continues to return in distorted and unresolved forms.
Gavril Pop engages with geometry as an unstable language system generated through repetition, subconscious association, and acts of recombination. By working with discarded materials carrying pre-existing traces — maps, books, paper remnants—he interrupts inherited systems of meaning, constructing new semiotic constellations in which symbols cease to signify fixed truths and instead remain permanently open to reinterpretation. His practice suggests that meaning itself is never given, only continuously assembled through fragile acts of reconstruction.
Ivana Mladenović operates at the unstable intersection between image-making, embodied experience, and the politics of social visibility. Working primarily with film, her practice consistently interrogates the invisible frameworks through which identities are produced, normalized, and disciplined. Rather than treating the moving image as a medium of representation, Mladenović approaches film as a site where ideological structures reveal themselves precisely through intimacy, vulnerability, and social friction.
The presence of Simona Runcan introduces an important historical axis to the exhibition. Her experimental practice, developed between conceptual graphic experimentation and later painterly investigations, positions abstraction as an open-ended process rather than a finished system. Seen retrospectively, her work offers a critical genealogy for contemporary forms of geometric thinking, revealing how seriality, repetition, and process have long functioned not merely as aesthetic strategies but as methods for questioning perception itself and the structures through which knowledge is organized.
