Organized by the Bucharest curatorial initiative Salonul de proiecte, “Small Things, Precious Things” offers a loving ode to the late artist Ionuț Cioană (1980-2020), who practiced under the pen name Mircea Nicolae, a combination of the names of two of his favorite writers: Mircea Eliade and Nicolae Labiș. In the slightly abandoned former garrison of Timișoara, A4 sheets frame the walls of each exhibition hall. Each contains a title, description and at least one color image, components of Nicolae’s corpus of blog entries, 100, 2007–10. Images range from installation shots of Nicolae’s works to a photo of a trash can in a public park with a thick white cursive reading “a hug(a dog), to what the artist describes as memories of his girlfriends’ past, like a single strawberry in a plastic bag and documentation of a developing skin fungus.
In his works, Nicolae frequently strays from pure facts. The fifty-five minute film Romanian Kiosk Company, 2010, takes occasional liberties in telling the confusing story of the artist’s family business that builds kiosks. The included anecdotes evoke her father’s alcoholism and her mother’s love of fancy high heels, against an informal inventory of Bucharest’s urban architecture. Accompanied by painted metal and glass sculptures imitating the buildings, the film serves as a chronicle of Romania’s transition to capitalism. But just as in Prosthesis for a broken stone2010, a plywood substitute for the missing half of a rock, Nicolae’s strength lies in discovering the poetic potential of the ordinary while maintaining a distance that some might consider cynical.
