Cristina Moraru
ON THE PERMEABILITY OF VISION AND THE INTELLIGENCE OF MATTER
Gregor Eldarb works with the image as if he were sculpting air – not seeking form, but the manner in which form breathes. His artistic practice reveals a disquiet tension between the visible and the invisible and a slow negotiation between material and vision, motion and perception, while exploring a threshold condition of the image: that fragile interval where perception gains substance and matter acquires the capacity to see. His work resists classification, spreading between different mediums in a manner in which painting converses with film, and drawing uncovers the trace of an architecture of perception, while remaining simultaneously pictorial and cinematic, analytical and intuitive, technical and sensuous.
Eldarb does not approach the image as a surface of representation, but as a field of forces. For him, the visible is an undefined and opened process, an intersectional space between light and matter, between reason and imagination, between geometric control and the unpredictability of perception. He seeks the fragile interval of permeability between things between things, those interstices in which matter seems to think and the image seems to breathe. In this sense, his work can be understood as a meditation on visual permeability – a return to the texture of perception and a way of understanding vision not as a simple optical act, but as a reciprocal relationship between the gaze and the object of perception.
His entire work can be read as a persistent investigation into the ways perception is constructed, refracted, and mediated. In doing so, his practice spans from constructivism and minimalism to the post-digital condition, proposing a philosophy of formation, rather than an encounter with the form. It invites us to perceive the image, not as a result, but at a continuous formation of what ‘seeps into form’ as long as time, light and matter join together to make visible what would otherwise remain hidden. Thus, each work is constituted as an experiment in which different mediums infiltrate one another: painting takes on a cinematic quality, drawing becomes a spatial diagram, while videos acquires material weight.
His art operates through a dynamic interplay of vision and structure, surface and depth, articulating a constant mediation between the tactile intelligence of materials and the abstract operations of perception. To understand Eldarb’s work is to inhabit a zone of permeability, a space where distinctions between the optical and the haptic, between idea and image, are blurred. This zone of permeability situates the visible as a field traversed by the invisible, by thought, emotion and memory, allowing the artwork to become a site of continual transition in which vision and thought, form and emotion, geometry and sensation merge into one another. In his series of paintings Composite Studies 1 and 2 – which can be seen as laboratories for visual permeability – form does not oppose chaos, but absorbs it, while geometry is not a constraint, but a multi-stratified structure through which perception circulates. The large format paintings in this series describe a composite thinking where forms do not simply overlap, but ‘seep into’ one another. In these works, fragments from different visual registers coexist within the same pictorial field: architectural models or sculpture, diagrams, traces of drawing or painting are combined, each layer maintaining its own integrity while remaining open to the infiltration of others.
The concept of visual permeability, here, does not refer to a simple aesthetic quality that resides in a particular tension or reflection, neither in layering, transparency, or stratification, but rather to an ontological condition of the image. In these works, the act of seeing means allowing yourself to be traversed by the image as an external force that circulates through you. The gaze is no longer an act of distancing, but one of participation which transforms the image into a space of codependence between subject and object, viewer and work, environment and reflection, all integrated into the same circuit of visibility.
As part of a visual permeability mode of cognition, each element in the composition interacts with the other: diagrams inform the geometry of the painted space, photographic textures dissolve into gradients of light, and shadows behave like stains that both conceal and reveal structure. Through these subtle visual exchanges, Eldarb investigate the possibilities of visualizing the intelligence of matter and the materiality of vision. Thus, these series of paintings show us how perception and substance, image and medium are continuously interrelated, reminding us that the act of seeing depends on the physical, temporal and emotional conditions that sustain it, and that every image is a composite of forces, energies, and resonances. The permeability of these studies is not just optical, but ontological, since vision itself becomes a material capable of absorbing, reflecting, and transforming the world it encounters.
In this logic, Eldarb shifts the old paradigm of representation. The image no longer shows something, it becomes the place where something shows itself. And this something is constituted within the very relationship between matter and light, between thought and sight. For example, in the painting Turbulence in a Channel I (2023), from the Composite Studies series, a subtle visual experiment transforms the canvas into a field of micro-events where the form manifest itself, creating tensions and transforming the canvas into a dynamic field of action, rather than a plane surface of depiction. Innumerable luminous particles are dispersed, clustered, or drifting into a deep dark background, suggesting both, the granular structure of matter and the flickering texture of perception itself. The painting oscillates between presenting a physical phenomenon and describing its cognitive resonance: one can read it as a visualization of turbulence, but also as a meditation on how perception organizes instability into form. Here, visual permeability is perceived in the relation between surface and depth, opacity and luminosity, opening up a new register of perceiving that is aware of the intelligence of matter.
Gregor Eldarb consistently investigates how matter itself thinks, and how materials, light, and perception can act as material agents responsible of their own becoming. In his installations, paintings and films, the intelligence of matter is approached simultaneously empirically and speculatively. The empirical dimension resides in physical experiments with liquid, pigment, projection, and motion, and is constituted as an experiment where material systems are allowed to perform their own internal logic: pigments disperse, coagulate, or evaporate, light refracts or reflects on different surfaces, liquid matter flows, infiltrates or spills under the influence of subtle perturbations. These events are not simply manipulated for visual effect, they are viewed as forms of thinking, as intellectual gestures through which matter displays its capacity of transformation.
On the other hand, the speculative dimension opens up a question about what it means for an image appear, exist, or think. Gregor Eldarb’s artistic experiments engage with an expanded ontology of the image, one in which images are not just inert representations of the physical world, but dynamic events created from material and energetic relations. In this sense, each work can be read as a philosophical diagram, a visualization of how matter and perception determine each other. This approach situates Gregor Eldarb as an artist-philosopher − activating between art and philosophy, between physics and phenomenology −, approaching the aesthetic form as a way of thinking through material processes, and cultivating conditions where matter can manifest its intelligence through dynamism, ambiguity, and transformation.
In his exhibition Turbulence in a Channel opened in May 2023 at Borderline Art Space in Iași, Gregor Eldarb demonstrates that matter does not passively receive the world, but participates in producing it, in shaping visibility and structuring perception. His works engages philosophically with a phenomenological approach to perception as an embodied, reciprocal relation between the perceiver and the perceived (Merleau-Ponty), while also resonating with new materialist theories that perceive agency, intelligence and vitality as qualities that are not exclusively linked to human consciousness (Karen Barad). In his video Turbulence in a Channel (2023), the act of seeing is inseparable from the observed matter, while the liquid is more than a medium, it becomes an agent of transformation, responding to gravitational forces or external structures, frames or obstacles, in an intelligent manner. Those responses are not dictated, but supported by the artist who allows the meaning to unfold freely through the intra-actions of the material and the immaterial.
For his video Turbulence in a Channel Gregor Eldarb creates a cinematic apparatus consisting of a movable frame supporting a basin that contains a mixture of black ink and silver pigment, a monitor installed above the frame in an angular position and a camera that captures the images projected on the basin surface which acts as a liquid mirror. The flexible frame of the basin allows the liquid to move from left to right, producing a gravitational pendulum effect that generates a multitude of organic shapes on the surface. The basin’s structure also includes metal elements that function as experimental obstacles which generate tensions in the fluidity of the liquid mass, opposing resistance and altering the velocity of the liquid. This creates the turbulences − the fractures, the desynchronizations, the disturbances − that visually describe the nature of liquidity. Thus, the subtle disruptions in the flow of the liquid matter can be viewed as reflections, as acts of consideration, while fluidity cannot be seen as subservient to a specific action, but as a generative force in itself.
Similarly, in his video Notes of Turning (2018), the intelligence of matter determines an event of visibility in which matter, light, motion and projection join together in a choreography of becoming. For this video, Gregor Eldarb creates a kinematic device composed of a rotating frame and two glass panels that capture the mirrored reflections of objects and images on the rotating support. The double reflection of the images created by the overlapping of the two glass panels determines a multiplication effect of the photographed object. Metaphorically, the experience of viewing Notes of Turning is similar to observing the very process of thinking made visible. There is not so much a representation, but a co-production of seeing, since the image is perpetually forming itself, dissolving itself, and forming again. The double reflection of the image is registering relations and generating a cognitive complexity as a response, each surface both registers and displaces what it reflects, producing an endless dialogue between vision and matter.
In the end, Gregor Eldarb’s work invites us to reconsider the boundaries between mater and vision, creating situations of becoming where form and though come together and influence one another. In his paintings, installations and films, the image is not static, but fluid − it’s allowed to breathe and think through its own material condition. In a world dominated by the rapid circulation of poor and disembodied images, his art uncovers the silent intelligence of materials, revealing a profundity of perception and a fragility of seeing, capable to absorb and transform. Gregor Eldarab approaches the image as a breathing surface, blurring the duality between mind and matter, artist and medium, seeing and being seen. Engaging in a philosophy of permeability, his work do not fix meanings, but produce conditions for the meaning to appear. Thus, Gregor Eldarb’s art moves toward a new ontology of the image that does not seek to represent the world, but to reveal the world’s capacity to represent itself through light, movement, turbulence and the subtle intelligence of its own matter.