„An art book about an exhibition can be a simple series of pages printed with nice photos of an exhibition. But that would only cover archival qualities. And it would stop there. But now think of an exhibition. The starting point is the series of artworks, but it keeps going. The space around the artworks is orchestrated with a lot of attention. The space of the room itself is transformed to be the world that those artworks need. It might be a white cube, it might be a repurposed apartment, it might be something completely different. Whatever it is, it is the ground in which the artworks anchor their roots. It’s the world you come into in tandem with the act of leaving another world outside. You are now creating space within you to experience the art, by the very fact that the curators and architects created a space around you. It’s a subtle and most of the times unrecognized shift. You are ready to explore and discover, and small hints are there to gently guide and colour your experience. 

This is what an artbook can do as well. All the feel, all the concepts, all the experience of the exhibition is not only recreated, it is created again in a way in which only the book can and the space cannot. The experience is continued with the aid of the experience of a book. Think of the materiality, think of the intimate focus you have with a book, think of the carefully guided attention that builds from page to page, a story that you yourself uncover. There is a pace, there is a rhythm. 

This is what I am exploring here with /SAC Gallery and the always-doing-something people behind the gallery that put in the work to bring into existence these kind of books. 

The Touch Nature books are created after the exhibition with the same name. Bringing together Romanian and Austrian artists alongside their perspectives of the ecosystem, of the world around us and inevitable the one inside us affected. It felt very much like the artist version of a scientific literature, a natural history book from the 1850s, when people were freshly discovering their surroundings. For a while those books didn’t have to be updated, but now they do. 

I felt like you holding in your hands an object like this would be an accurate feeling to be immersed in, and would be the right world that could hold numerous points of view, different but on the same subject. 

There were two exhibition spaces at the same time, with two different takes - an apartment from the Anthropocene and bigger space, a forest growth filled with plants and artworks blending into one environment. And just like these, as they were different spaces under the same curatorial concept, so are the books, created as individual but housed into a box cover. The third book holds all the texts, floor plans, artist presentations and additional details that further describe the world created.

Walking through the exhibitions your eyes would move from artwork to artwork, like discovering your surroundings. This was not a white cube. But the space was also thought out so that you could stop and easily focus and be with just one artwork. I wanted to capture this in the book as well, where you see multiple images in a spread, apparently with no rules for arrangement, with enough space around so that the artwork is allowed that space for connection. From time to time the book guides you in a pause with a certain artwork, single on a spread and with generous space around it. There are no details written on the image spreads, so your “walk” is undisturbed. Instead, afterwards, you discover all artworks listed with details and their stories. 

The paper used, the reason why letters dissipate and fade away, the apparent restricted amount of information while also having it all in front of you, the fonts that subtly give a specific voice in your head as you are reading, the curation of the images, the discussions behind all of them, I leave to you to discover, although, their role is to not be discovered consciously but rather be only felt as the world around the artworks. ” (Victor Bartiș)