In Attunement
Stefan Galeanu & Angelica Dochia
In Attunement brings together two distinct painting practices that explore how lines, grids and architectural forms shape the act of looking. Over a month-long residency, the artists made oil paintings that come together at the threshold, where space, image and viewer interact.
To attune oneself is to adjust one’s perception in relation to something. When we encounter a window, a frame or an image, we do not experience it from a fixed position. We move closer or further away, search for an angle, shift our bodies, look through an opening, respond to changing light, become aware of what remains inaccessible. Perception adjusts itself to the material conditions of the space.
The two artists approach this from different positions. Angelica Dochi paints the wrought-iron grilles of Barcelona’s windows over her figures, leaving gaps where fragile details emerge; Ștefan Găleanu turns to thresholds, tiled surfaces and reflections, where observing and being observed become unstable.
In this sense, attunement describes a mode of encounter in which neither the subject nor the environment can be understood independently: the experience emerges through their relation. As Georges Didi-Huberman suggests, what we see also looks at us. The encounter with an artwork begins when the viewer’s position is disrupted, when the work concerns us and demands that we occupy a position before it. The work, then, is exhausted neither by its production nor by its reception. It occupies the space in-between, where each gaze activates a particular configuration.
Painting has always been a kind of virtual space, a way of making someone present through an image. A figure who is not in the room can still meet our eyes. Through the frame, we look in on a private gesture, a body, a room or an intimate moment, a little like voyeurs.
The artists invite us to inhabit that condition, to remain for a moment between inside and outside, looking and being looked at, presence and absence, the material surface and its depth, and perhaps to recognise that the space between the artwork and its viewer is not empty at all.
It is where a singular encounter takes place,
where looking becomes relation,
and where the work is set in motion.
Text: Adriana Monroy Galindo
With the support of the Barcelona Institute of Culture and the Government of Catalonia