In the Living Room Shadows Burn

The space choreographs movement, enforces ideologies, and silently maps the power structures of our lives. In the livingroom shadows burn engages with this force, staging a double solo show that unfolds as a spatial disobedience. Split between two places, Posibilă Gallery and Zina Gallery, the show follows how artworks mutate as they cross thresholds, shifting between the intimate architectures of private life and the constructed neutrality of public spaces. Posibilă Gallery mimics the layered intimacy of a living room, while Zina Gallery is reframed as a Salon, akin to the historical concept of it. At Posibilă Gallery, Florian’s paintings are as natural and necessary as anything around them. The works carry an unusual familiarity, humming with the presence of their surroundings. They are not merely seen but lived with, reflecting intimacy, introversion, and the quiet unease of being annoyed by your own environment. In this setting, the paintings look back—they assert a sentience, a coexistence, a quiet defiance to the idea of being thought of as mere objects. ’’My birthplace, the cradle of my family, the house where I may have been born, the tree I may have seen grow (that my father may have planted the day I was born), the attic of my childhood filled with intact memories. Such places don’t exist, and it’s because they don’t exist that space becomes a question, ceases to be self-evident, ceases to be incorporated, ceases to be appropriated. Space is a doubt: I have to constantly mark it, to designate it, it is never mine, never given to me, I have to conquer it.’’ [1] The exhibition opens with the painting In the living room shadows burn - a found digital image of an abandoned house - mounted on a moving wall. This shifting image imposes the viewer’s movements, drawing them closer and then pushing them away in a dynamic loop that mirrors the feeling of stepping into a house in a video game. The exhibition flows in a non-linear, fluid way, encouraging visitors to engage with the space, to step in and step out, just as one would enter and leave the rooms of a house. The first room, a room full of portraits, appears as a symbolic domestic setting—images of loved ones or ancestors hanging in a home. Luca Florian’s portraits convey a distortion of reality, a desubjectivization, because many of them appear indefinite, some lack the mouth, the eyes, or any feature that could bring emotion. There’s a sense of warmth and recognition, but the portraits can quickly turn into something strange, an unsettling tension between the warmth of domesticity and the coldness of being observed, always defined by external forces, by other people’s intentions that dictate how we perform our identities within the spaces we occupy for their need of closeness. In the next room, the paintings take a more atmospheric turn, as if the artist decided to swap out portraits for objects and landscapes that look like they’ve just rolled out of a dream—or perhaps an editorial magazine that took a fragmented turn. The painting World of Dogs portrays Luca’s dog, Duru, seated on a very basic Ikea chair—an object familiar to many. In this context, the chair can become a symbol of the global ubiquity of consumer goods, a standardized object that populates millions of living rooms around the world. The chair in the painting is brought into real life not as the standard version we know, but reimagined and scaled down, specifically for kids—or, in this case, for Duru, the dog, who probably couldn’t care less about the capitalist forces that produced it. ’’To live is to pass from one space to another, while doing your very best not to bump yourself’’ [2] In the last, tiny room, you can see just a painting of a fireplace, surrounded by curtains—that classic symbol of warmth, coziness, and family holiday photos that make you question every life decision you’ve ever made. Cramped and claustrophobic, the fireplace doesn’t warm you so much as it traps you in a heat-induced existential crisis. Instead of filling the room with comfort, it feels like the weight of a system, forcing you to stew in your own feelings of inadequacy. It’s the kind of warmth that slowly kills you with kindness. In the living room shadows burn is an exploration of how space, be it familiar, architectural, or cultural shapes our sense of identity and autonomy. There is a quiet dissonance between the spaces we attempt to cultivate for ourselves and the ones we inherit or are forced to adapt to when we think if we are truly ever at home. [1] Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, Penguin Group, 2008. [2] Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, Penguin Group, 2008. Daniela Custrin Part of the multi-annual program, Intertwined Relationships. Contaminated Exchange, co-financed by the Administration of the National Cultural Fund (for the period 2024-2025).