Alex Manea 

TEXT:

 

     In After Presence, I engage with spaces that were once alive with activity, purpose, and human attention, now emptied and silent. Houses, cinemas, factories, schools, hospitals, amusement parks, each site carries traces of lives once lived and intentions now dissipated. I work with fine liner on recycled paper, a material whose fragility and prior existence mirror the histories embedded within these spaces. The paper itself becomes a participant in the work, holding memory alongside the marks I draw and carrying the residue of a past life that resonates with the architectural traces I explore.

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     I am fascinated by the way architecture retains emotion, how walls can absorb the energies of those who inhabited them, and how decay transforms these structures into unexpected forms of expression. Abandoned places are rarely silent in the fullest sense; they speak through absence, through the patterns left by human activity and the effects of time. These works treat absence not as emptiness, but as presence transformed. They are an exploration of how abandonment, whether of spaces or versions of ourselves, leaves traces that persist beyond immediate perception.

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     Through patient, repetitive line work, I reconstruct these environments, translating silence and emptiness into forms that preserve memory without claiming to restore it. Drawing becomes a slow, deliberate act of attention and care, a quiet resistance to disappearance. Each mark is simultaneously an act of recognition and an acceptance of impermanence, a way of acknowledging that decay is not failure but a form of ongoing transformation. In this sense, the series negotiates the tension between memory and oblivion, between what is preserved and what inevitably fades.

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     These works also reflect on temporality and human presence in ways that extend beyond architecture. The gestures, traces, and voids in the spaces I depict are not only the remnants of lives that once filled them, but also reflections of cycles of engagement and withdrawal. They suggest that even in abandonment, structures retain echoes of intention, and that our encounters with them carry a shared responsibility for what remains.

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     Ultimately, After Presence is a meditation on continuity and disappearance. The series does not attempt to revive or reconstruct the past in its fullness, but instead traces the subtle persistence of life and memory within absence. The works dwell in that fragile space where time, material, and human traces intersect, revealing that presence endures even after it seems to have vanished, and that silence can contain as much resonance as sound itself. In the quiet of these abandoned forms, I find a lingering dialogue between what was and what continues to exist beyond perception.