MLF l Marie-Laure Fleisch is pleased to announce Romanian artist Alex Mirutziu's first exhibition in Belgium, This, like..., opening September 7, 2017 in conjunction with Brussels Gallery Weekend and accompanied by a critical text written by Eugenio Viola. Employing performance, drawing, poetry and sculpture, Mirutziu looks to art to answer the fundamental questions of life – “Who are we” and “How do we perceive reality”.

Inspired by philosophers such as Graham Harman and Timothy Morton who question how we use objects to interpret the world around us, Mirutziu looks to anchor the contemplation of our being in the physical world. He then enriches this basis with political histories, personal letters and the natural world, exposing how each person confronts their own existence. For his current exhibition, born from a sense of admiration and camaraderie for Iris Murdoch and an interest in the possibility for gestures to become objects, Mirutziu has created a series of drawings and sculptures which draw our attention to the moments when our attempts to grasp meaning manifest themselves physically. Whether we express ourselves through poetry, conversation, or writing, the relationship between that which is said and that which is left unsaid is extremely important. During the short period when we try to wrap our heads around complicated concepts or grand ideas, what we do during our moments of silence are very revealing.

Using the Irish philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch as an embodiment of a universal phenomenon, Mirutziu looks into the construction and de-construction of a brilliant mind that is searching for ways to comprehend and communicate the intricacies of the world we live in. Murdoch has the particularity of being an extremely prolific writer, dedicating her life to novels, philosophy and also personal correspondences with a large number of friends and lovers. Later in her life she developed Alzheimer’s, losing the capacity to navigate her own thoughts and witnessing the degeneration of her own mind. No longer able to carry on writing due to a loss of memory, Murdoch found herself in an undefined mental space, where she was unable to connect her present reality to other points of reference.

When grappling to express the ideas in one’s own mind and create meaning, we often give our internal struggle corporal form, through the lowering of our gaze or through gestures which seem to attempt to create a motor which will speed up the firing of the neurons in our brain. Using Iris Murdoch as a muse, Mirutziu gives physical weight to these temporal movements, creating drawings and sculptures which represent the unique ways a body expresses its mental exertion. For example, if Iris Murdoch could form concrete objects with her own body language, what would they look like? Or, more broadly, what are the possible physical manifestations of the mind struggling to place one's ideas in the framework of our society or even in the trajectory of one's own thoughts? Using the space between Murdoch’s body and her hands when she gesticulates, the movement of her eyes when she pauses to regroup her thoughts, or the way she shifts her body, Mirutziu creates artworks which clarify mental processes through palpable forms, underlying the relationship between one’s intellect and one’s body.