Todd Gray: Portals
Perrotin, Los Angeles, US
Anca Mureșan: Painting Unbound
Arsmonitor, Bucharest, RO
Until May 7 at ARSMONITOR in Bucharest, Painting Unbound presents a body of work by Anca Mureșan that begins from painting but refuses to stay obediently within its usual “job description”. What appears on the surface does not proceed from representation or fantasy in any conventional sense, but from layers that have built up, settled, and crystallized. The resulting image comes closer to a “palimpsest” than to a picture in the traditional sense, which is perhaps another way of saying that these works remember more than they explain. In Mureșan’s still too little discussed practice, that is precisely the point.
One of the central tensions in the exhibition lies in the unstable distinction between image and writing. In Mureșan’s work, that line is not blurred, but arguably being pushed toward collapse. Exquisite mark-making trembles, and so does the picture. The image, understood as iconic, loses its index through what the text describes as a radical iconoclastic gesture. Writing, meanwhile, slips from the symbolic into subversion and self-sabotage, losing stable meaning along the way. It is an appealingly unruly situation: neither image nor text behaves quite as expected, and both seem to have decided that clarity is overrated.
The exhibition title, Painting Unbound, emerges from this condition of openness. In the curator’s view, one can argue that the title makes an indirect connection with Georges Didi-Huberman’s notion of the “open image”—not as a direct theoretical support for Mureșan’s process, but as a broader resonance with the work’s openness on several levels. More concretely, that openness lies in the medium itself, in the gesture of painting beyond the canvas, in the prolonged temporality of works that develop over several years on a single surface, and in the way they ask the viewer to open themselves to the encounter. In other words, the paintings do not so much offer an image as invite a kind of recalibration. One might say they ask for patience, though perhaps “surrender” is the more accurate word.
Mureșan refers to her works as “instances,” and the term suits them well. Each one stands as a witness to an inner world that is both concrete and turbulent, recorded through accumulation. If painting has traditionally promised an image to look at, Painting Unbound offers something entirely different. It presents an opening, a residue, a surface where image and language meet, fuse, and undo each other all at once. Which is, frankly, more interesting than another painting pretending to know exactly what it is.
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Last Updated on April 16, 2026
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About the author:
Julien Delagrange (b. 1994, BE) is an art historian, contemporary artist, and the director of CAI and CAI Gallery. Previously, Delagrange has worked for the Centre for Fine Arts (BOZAR) in Brussels, the Jan Vercruysse Foundation, and the Ghent University Library. His artistic practice and written art criticism are strongly intertwined, examining contemporary art in search of new perspectives in the art world.
