| VLAD NANCĂ | Biography | |
| Adsumus | ||
| curated by Pietro Gaglianò | ||
| September 18 – November 7 2025 |
Gallery Il Ponte reopens the exhibition season after the summer break with a solo show dedicated to Vlad Nancă – artist with whom the gallery has collaborated for some years (previously, the artist exhibited in this space in 2018 with It Happens (a show for two artists with Luca Resta), curated by Paola Tognon.
In this new exhibition, the artist takes his exploration of the modernist architectural legacy further through his distinctive visual language and recurring themes, reinterpreting “brutalist” architectural drawings as performative gestures and poetic constructs.
For his solo exhibition at Il Ponte, Vlad Nancă presents a new body of work that continues the trajectory of Human Scale, the project he initiated and co-authored for the Romanian Pavilion at this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale.
At the heart of both projects lies an exploration of 20th century architectural drawings from Romania, with a particular focus on the depiction and symbolism of scale figures, those small silhouettes that silently populate the rendered architectural space.
In Florence, Nancă revisits a selection of archival drawings, transforming these figures into life size sculptural presences. As with the works exhibited at the Giardini, his hybrid drawing and sculpture pieces retrieve anonymous bodies from the periphery of architectural thought and reposition them as subjects of artistic reflection.
Drawing inspiration from the use of tracing paper in traditional architectural practice — or what might now be seen as an archaic method — Nancă overlays these figures onto translucent surfaces, partially removing them from their original context. Into these spectral compositions, he collages celestial forms such as planets, stars, and fragments of cosmic matter, opening a contemplative space where the human presence is reframed within a vast universal continuum.
In Nancă’s vision, these ephemeral silhouettes evolve into quiet meditations on the human condition: transient, layered, and suspended between the immediacy of daily life and the enduring mystery of the cosmos.
“The title Adsumus (Latin for “We are here”) serves as a quiet claim of presence on Earth, considered as one of many possible planets to inhabit. The title echoes the speculative gaze of space colonization while grounding itself in the familiar: the distinctive scale figures from 20th-century architectural drawings, once used to suggest human presence in designed environments. Recast in a cosmic context, these figures become markers of our fragile but persistent occupation of a planetary surface” (Vlad Nancă, 2025).
Vlad Nancă. Adsumus
The twentieth century embraced the Enlightenment aspiration for humankind to achieve happiness, by whichever means. In town planning and architecture, it took up this mission on a large scale, interpreting it in utopian and dystopian terms and radically reviewing the relationship between built space and human beings. The theoretical and visual outlook inspiring Vlad Nancă’s work translates this desire for happiness into pragmatic thinking: planning. Humanity is always present in technical drawing. The shapes conceptualize the human body and bring out its scalar value vis-à-vis the architecture. Nancă turns his artistic gaze to the fractures entailed in these scenarios, seizing on their silhouettes as points of criticality. There is a disconnect between the new humankind and the world it apparently inhabits. The two processes of teaching happiness and creating habitat end up on different, artificially overlapping levels, which he highlights in his work on the original panels. Taken out of the drawing and placed on another scale, the figures show their concision, anticipating the post-human ethics of recent decades. There is something alarming about their alien morphology. It reveals the colonizing instinct of every settlement, of humankind’s every appropriation of the planet. So these works are animated by questions more pressing than the last century’s forced happiness: What happiness? Who for? At what cost?
Pietro Gaglianò, Firenze, settembre 2025
