The images of the fierce competition for the colonization of outer space recently waged by the technological giants Space X and Blue Origin, owned by the multi-billionaires Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, have brought back to public attention the theme of the "space race" specific to the 1960s, intensely romanticized by popular culture. By proposing colonies on Mars or in space orbit, the space program developed by these private companies evokes the subversion of the ideals of human survival to a cynical capitalist rationality, governed by the value of profit, and the futility of these efforts as an alternative to the climate catastrophe that continues to unfold before our eyes.

Although the space race between the Soviet Union and the United States of America, the two superpowers of the Cold War period, went mainly for the development of orbital satellites, interplanetary travel and especially for alienization, the colonization of space remained subsidiary to the space programmes developed by NASA and the Programme Soviet Space.

The evocation of this colonial imaginary in the Solaris exhibition, presented at Artep Gallery, suggests a narrative fiction set in a post-apocalyptic future, in which the forced colonization of space, which has become the only option of a devastated planet in search of "Planet B", is faced with the inherent limitations of a socio-economic and political thinking captive to extractive capitalism, largely responsible for climate change.

The exhibition borrows not only the title, but also some literary and visual motifs from Stanislav Lem's novel of the same name, as well as from its screen adaptation by director Andrei Tarkovski.

These borrowings are filtered through a personal exercise in cultural archeology of the science fiction imaginary adapted to become a tool for existential analysis of impending planetary catastrophe. Thus, in a non-linear dramaturgy, Claudiu Ciobanu stages the meeting of anonymous space explorers and colonists with the planet-organism from Lem's novel. In the paintings of this series, made in a technique close to pictorial photorealism, the motif of modernist architecture in ruins, overrun by luxuriant, uncontrollable vegetation, constitutes a stable scenographic landmark, which ambiguously situates the protagonists in a perpetual state of waiting. In an exercise of imagination mediated by digital technology, one of these characters becomes the subject of an augmented reality experiment, leaving for a moment the static presence that characterizes these characters, absorbed in meditative activities.

If in Lem's novel, Solaris, the fictional living planet, was able to communicate telepathically with space explorers and probe their unconscious, in the current exhibition it becomes a screen capable of reflecting the artist's fears and perplexities in the face of an uncertain planetary future. What is the future of humanity? In what kind of social organization will children live in the coming decades? What can we learn from the recent history of our human footprint on nature?

Curator, Cristian Nae