Can a fragment preserve the memory of the whole from which it comes, even when it becomes part of a new form?
At what point does recognition become insufficient, so that the image detaches from its original function and enters a new regime of signification? Change does not always occur through rupture; it can arise through subtle shifts, fragmentation, and changes of perspective, through which the familiar becomes strange without the link to its origin disappearing entirely.
In Alexandru Dascălu’s practice, these questions are articulated around an elementary form, the human profile, subjected to a process of fragmentation, multiplication, and reassembly. What emerges is not only an exploration of the sculptural potential of the image, but also an investigation into the instability of identity: into how a form can continue to exist even when the conditions of its recognition have changed.
The profile functions here as a visual and conceptual reference point. Traditionally associated with the portrait, with individuation, and with the representation of a singular presence, it is extracted from the regime of the image to become building material. Cut out, multiplied, rotated, and reassembled, it gradually loses its representational autonomy and enters a system of relations that alters its status.
The face becomes a fragment, the fragment becomes a module, and the module participates in the constitution of a structure that can no longer be reduced to the image from which it started. The origin remains perceptible, but it is no longer sufficient to explain the result. Between recognition and abstraction, the works maintain a productive tension: we see what was, without being able to fully identify what has become. In his poem Archaic Torso of Apollo, Rainer Maria Rilke captures the force of a sculpture whose fragment preserves a presence that exceeds the limits of the surviving form. Similarly, in Alexandru Dascălu’s work, the original image continues to act from within its transformations, without being recoverable as a whole.
This shift from representation to object places Dascălu’s approach within an essential problematic of modern and contemporary sculpture: the liberation of form from the obligation to reproduce a stable referent. Rather than preserving the image, the artist tests its limits, transforming it into an element capable of generating new configurations.
In this sense, the works can be viewed in proximity to practices such as those of Tony Cragg, in which objects and fragments, reorganized into ensembles, participate in the emergence of forms that exceed the identity of their components, or those of Anthony Caro, who explored the sculptural potential of metal by assembling steel elements into abstract structures in which the relationships between components become essential to the configuration of the whole. The comparison does not imply an equivalence between these approaches, but indicates a shared interest in how the reorganization of matter can generate autonomous structures and transform the relationships between fragment, form, and perception.
Repetition plays a decisive role in this process. Far from being the mere reproduction of an identical element, it introduces variation as a principle of construction. Each recurrence modifies the relationship between part and whole, between the recognizable unit and the structure into which it is integrated. Here, Dascălu’s approach can be placed in dialogue with Gilles Deleuze’s reflection in Difference and Repetition, where repetition does not designate the reproduction of a form identical to itself, but a process that generates difference. Applied to the sculptural configurations in the exhibition, this perspective allows repetition to be understood as a generative process: the element returns, but its context, orientation, and relationships with the other elements change its status. What repeats, therefore, does not remain unchanged.
Through accumulation and variation, the human profile detaches from the singularity of the face and reorganizes itself into a sculptural structure in which the initial identity is redistributed among its multiple components. The singular opens toward the multiple, and the initial identity is redistributed within a collective configuration. At this point, sculpture can no longer be understood only as a finished object, delimited by a contour, but also as a system of transformations, in which each element participates in a larger structure without completely losing the trace of its origin.
The drawings, templates, and modular structures present in the exhibition extend this logic beyond the finished objects. They make visible the stages and tools through which forms are designed, repeated, and organized, bringing the working process into the field of the exhibition experience. The space thus functions not merely as a place of presentation, but becomes part of an ensemble in continuous negotiation between project and materialization, between the possibility of a form and its concrete configuration. The forms retain the traces of their own becoming, as if what they were before constituting themselves as objects continued to exist, discreetly, within them.
The title The Things We Become extends this formal investigation into a reflection on becoming. The pronoun “we” introduces a collective dimension, while the term “things” suspends the distinction between subject and object, between what we are and what we come to be. Becoming does not appear as a linear succession of states oriented toward a final identity, but as a transformation in which earlier forms continue to persist without entirely determining what follows. Similarly, the profile in Dascălu’s works neither disappears with its transformation nor remains intact: it persists as trace, structure, and possibility, within configurations that exceed its initial meaning.
From this perspective, identity is not an invariable core hidden behind changes, but is constituted through relations and successive transformations. T. S. Eliot’s line, “In my beginning is my end,” evokes precisely this paradoxical continuity between origin and transformation: what precedes a form does not disappear with its appearance, but persists in the structure of what it becomes. Alexandru Dascălu’s sculptures offer no definitive resolution of this tension. They keep it active, making visible the moment when the image begins to detach from itself and to exist otherwise.
Perhaps becoming does not mean arriving at a definitive form, but continually moving away from any possible definition. Over the course of a decade, Alexandru Dascălu’s practice can be seen as such a path: not as a succession of forms that cancel one another out, but as a series of transformations in which each new configuration preserves, modifies, and surpasses what preceded it. The origin remains present, but can no longer fully explain the result; the past persists, without being able to dictate the form of the present. Perhaps the real question is not what remains unchanged in us, but how far we can move from what we have been without ceasing, in some way, to be the same person.
Cristina Chirilă, curator