FANY SINGER. Fugit Irreparabile Tempus.The Graphics of an Irreversible Becoming

The opening of the event will take place at the headquarters of the host institution (Bánffy Palace, Unirii Square no. 30), on July 23, 2025 starting at 06:00 PM. 

Special Guest: Dorel Găină

"Sed fugit interea, fugit irreparabile tempus -But meanwhile time flies it flies never to be regained ", wrote Vergilius in Georgics, formulating a truth that man carries within himself: time passes, and with it, we pass. This awareness of the irreversibility of time, obsessively present in all forms of art throughout the centuries, becomes in the exhibition Fugit Irreparabile Tempus not only a theme for reflection, but also a working material, a driving force and a space for artistic questioning.

Artist Fany Singer proposes, in her exhibition, a graphic perception of time. The artist draws and imagines shadows, passages, exposures and intentionality. Time is treated not just as an abstract concept or a dimension to be measured, but as a living parameter of creation. Graphics becomes a tool to visualize not only what is, but especially what is lost. Each work is a visual meditation on the contemporary temporal crisis - an age in which we are constantly living in a race against the clock, in a fragmented, accelerated, precarious present.

In this context, the exhibited works visualize recognizable symbols of time: the shadow left by the Sun - recalling the earliest forms of time measurement, the slow flow of sand in an hourglass - the classic image of the ephemeral, the clock on the wall - as a witness to the daily routine, and the wristwatch that we consult reflexively, instantaneously, without being aware of what we are actually measuring. These elements appear transfigured, re-semnified, abstracted or merely suggested, but they underpin the visual discourse as bridges between collective memory and current anxiety.

Fany Singer explores time not as an objective measure, but as a dimension of inner becoming. The line, the stain, the texture become not just plastic means, but traces of a consciousness that searches itself in time, confronts its own ephemerality and tries to transcend it through the image. The graphics presented here do not illustrate time, but live it. Each work is a tension between form and absence, between duration and succession, between what was and what will be.

The exhibition proposes an immersion in two major ways of understanding time, taken from the philosophical tradition: a substantialist one, in which time is an entity in itself, a "riverbed" in which existence flows, and a relationalist one, in which time exists only in and through things, phenomena, processes. Fany Singer does not position herself firmly on one side or the other - but juggles between them. In some works, time seems suspended, like a heavy, almost mineral presence; in others, it is ephemeral, fragmented, like a memory that falls apart the very moment it is evoked.

Bergsonian influences are perceptible in the way time is approached as lived duration, not as measurable succession. The graphic becomes a space in which the past does not disappear, but continues to pulsate in the present, and the future is not logical anticipation, but a space of potential. This affective, subjective duration is rendered through compositions that avoid rigid symmetry in favor of fluid, dynamic unfoldings in which the image "flows" like a consciousness in transformation.

But Fugit Irreparabile Tempus is not just an inner journey. The exhibition also touches on the deep existential dimension of the human being: the assumption of one's own passage. The artist does not run away from time, but accepts it, questions it, faces it lucidly. Here we find a rapprochement with Heidegger's thought, for whom being is always a being-in-time, a being-becoming-death. In this context, the graphic becomes a gesture of awareness: of what we lose, of what can no longer be recovered, but also of what can be fully experienced now.

A subtle aspect of the exhibition is rhythmicity - expressed visually through repetition, variation, graphic echo. Each work seems to have its own 'internal time', its own reading tempo, imposing on the viewer a slowing down, a paying attention, a silence. In this sense, Fugit Irreparabile Tempus is not only an exhibition about passage, but also about presence. A plea for the rediscovery of time as a living experience, not just as a resource.

And perhaps, in the face of these works, Vergiliu is not just an echo of the past, but a silent presence reminding us: yes, time is fleeting. But that is why we must learn to look at it. To become aware of it. To transform it, through art, into living duration. Fugit Irreparabile Tempus is thus not just a statement of fact, but an invitation to lucidity, to live each moment with our eyes wide open, before it becomes the past. (Horațiu Cristea, curator)