Matei Arnăutu

Photo: Digital Fine Art on Hahnemühle Paper PhotoRag®Ultra Smoth, 305 g/m², 100% Baumwolle, weiss

Edition 1/3 + 1 artist proof

In his new series of photos "Anonymous opus manuum artificis" the artist probes a new type of social behaviour neighbouring disposophobia, which leads to the emergence of an attractive space for the artist: the closet - DIY workshop.

The debauchery/storage/closet/workshop is an endless source of useless, old things that transcend time and space, often "arranged" in an "order" governed by chaos. A vacuous horror full of meaning, memories, forgotten desires of the possessors. The storage place - workshop, seen in its essence, is taken over by the artist and transformed into an object of research and reinterpretation. This space becomes an alter ego of today's society, an image in which disorder, chaos, useless things, separation from the past, often idealized, occur as the result of a dramatic rupture between different mentalities and generations. Matei Arnăutu revealed that the source of his inspiration was given by the following reality: ''in the living space of a Bucharest inhabitant or his near vicinity, there is a storage space, a closet, a garage, a box in the basement of the ''bloc'' (block of flats), etc., where those objects that no longer find their purpose or usefulness in the house are stored, yet the owner "does not dare" to relinquish. This mild form of Compulsive hoarding creates some cluttered spaces, some of which become veritable "time capsules" containing objects which can illustrate the evolution of a culture over several generations."