Sector 1 Gallery presents the new solo exhibition of the artist Norbert Filep, entitled "Chronicles from the Habitable Zone".

The exhibition presents three new series of conceptual works by the artist, starting from phenomena, discoveries, measurements and observations in the field of astronomy. Through a personal de-click, the artist attempts a possible subjectivization of the scientific results that affirm, with immeasurable veracity, the existence of complex processes in the astronomical field. At the same time, the works incorporate the intrinsic curiosity of human nature, to discover and understand the vast dimension and plurivalence of the universe of which we are a part - we learn from the gallery.

<<In recent years, Norbert Filep's practice has focused on using drawing to reflect on informational processes, in a hyper-digitalized era. Drawing once again becomes the main tool of the artist, who codifies scientific information in new artistic forms. In this case, he aims at the realm of astronomy, exo-planetary territory, extraterrestrial space becoming his playground.

Whether we're talking about spectroscopy or looking at the high-resolution pictures obtained by the Hubble and James Webb telescopes, the mixture of the two types of information helps to establish objective features in the discovery of exoplanets. The technological processes used in obtaining and reading data extracted from the field of astronomy are used by the artist to generate his own visual language>> - Sector 1 Gallery statement.

<<The simple and direct character of the drawing as a medium coincides with the minimalistic and objective aspect of the data found in the tables that measure the light transit of the planets. They "draw" with their shadow abstract lines by which different characteristics are determined: size, chemical composition, mass and the time interval by which an orbital cycle ends, used by Norbert Filep as starting points for the works. Thus the paper transcends the support status and becomes part of the Cartesian system, the XY coordinate system for abstracting the information resulting from the measurements of the Kepler telescope, for example. 

The same graphic is handled with the repetitive meticulousness of a watchmaker in the series of works “Spatial documents”, where through the excessive repetition of the transit drawing, spatial illusions of the transit phenomenon are created. Works such as Trappist-1e or Luyten B use the information attributed to the planets of the same name. The works represent the greatly reduced size of the planets constructed entirely of the figure describing the distance from Earth to them, located at various light-year distances from Earth.

Technological limitations in extra-planetary exploration generate information in an archaic form, which represents for Norbert Filep a subject for archiving in the form of a drawing, materialized in the form of an alteration of the boundary between objectivity and subjectivity. Thus, the objective information of astronomical research becomes a tool of artistic subjectivity, where the interpretations remain correlated with an open playing space and freed from the objective dimension of these types of information.>>

(Sector 1 Gallery)

Norbert Filep is a visual artist who works and lives in Cluj-Napoca. His conceptual practice uses drawing as a central mechanism to approach abstraction. Through accumulation and repetition, his works reconstruct, redefine and reflect on the various processes of information creation and structuring. He had solo exhibitions at MV Sci-Art, Timișoara, Mie Lefever Gallery, Ghent, Sector 1 Gallery, Bucharest, Matca Art Space and The Paintbrush Factory, Cluj-Napoca. His works can be found in the collections of the Bucharest National Museum of Contemporary Art, the Bucharest Museum of Recent Art, the ING Art collection, the Transilvania Bank art collection, along with many other private collections around the world.

The exhibition is organized by Sector 1 Gallery.