PHOTOFOBIA

[ILINCA BERNEA | Curator]

Photophobia is a symptom of abnormal intolerance to the visual perception of light. As a medical symptom, photophobia is an experience of discomfort or pain to the eyes, due to light exposure or by presence of actual physical sensitivity. The images are produced in the brain and re-transmitted to the retina; they are not products of the eye. The series of works by Dan Voinea, collected under the title "There from where nothing can be seen", addresses photophobia as an allegory of a crisis of the sight - image binomial and as confusion syndrome: inability to clearly focus a reality. The sight no longer has a point of support. The world has become an informal and confusing magma of suggestions, impressions, concepts and sensations. Photophobia also alludes to the runaway from visibility and to the anxiety resented in contact with a confusing, discordant, atonal and inconsistent reality, in which man no longer finds a vital center. Dan Voinea paints invisible spaces and a state of existential baffling. The characters in the works are captive in an objectless narrative, frozen in the void. Their identity is as imprecise as the connection with the vague space in which they are placed. They have strange, sleepy appearances and seem to be touched by a state of consciousness' blindness. Apparently they are depersonalized, floating themselves in virtuality.