Collaborative project by Otilia Cadar and Liviu Coman
Hosted by Art Yourself Gallery
Nap Of The Earth (NOE) was a large-scale collaborative exhibition developed for the four-year anniversary of Art Yourself Gallery in Bucharest, where we were invited to exhibit as an artistic duo.
The title originates from the military aviation term nap-of-the-earth flight, describing an extremely low-altitude flight path used by aircraft to avoid detection in hostile environments. Within the context of the exhibition, the term became a poetic and philosophical metaphor: an invitation to move as close as possible to the Earth, to origins, matter, memory, and survival.
The project explored the fragile persistence of cultural identity within speculative post-apocalyptic landscapes shaped by technological excess, displacement, and ecological transformation.
For this exhibition, I created a series of paintings depicting solitary human figures wearing traditional clothing from different regions of the world while wandering through desolate terrains. The characters appeared as survivors, witnesses, or final carriers of disappearing cultural memory. Their garments functioned as traces of ancestry and identity suspended within transformed environments.
The works reflected an ongoing interest in roots, migration, collective memory, and the tension between tradition and accelerated technological civilization. In many of the paintings, the landscape itself appeared partially artificial or exhausted, as if nature shaped into a new uncertain terrain.
Expanding through the entire gallery space, Liviu Coman constructed a monumental wooden installation inspired by organic growth structures similar to those explored in our earlier project DERMA. Visitors were invited to physically navigate through and beneath the installation, transforming the act of viewing into a spatial journey.
Embedded throughout the structure were small electrical and mechanical moving sculptures created from inexpensive plastic toys and industrial fragments. These animated hybrid entities became one of the central attractions of the exhibition. Simultaneously playful and unsettling, they suggested speculative future organisms: artificial beings emerging after the disappearance or transformation of the natural world.
The contrast between handcrafted traditional clothing in the paintings and the synthetic mechanical creatures within the installation created a dialogue between ancestry and futurism, fragility and adaptation, organic memory and technological mutation.
As in many of our collaborative projects, the exhibition functioned as a total environment rather than a conventional painting display. Painting, architecture, movement, sound, mechanics, and viewer interaction merged into an immersive speculative landscape.
The conceptual framework of the exhibition was accompanied by a fragment from Aristotle’s Physics, reflecting our interest in the distinction between natural existence and constructed artificial forms, a philosophical tension that informed the entire project.
Mediums: Painting, installation, kinetic sculpture, immersive environment
Location: Art Yourself Gallery
Year: 2015
Occasion: Four-year anniversary exhibition of the gallery
Bugaku, 2015. Oil on canvas, 100 x 80 cm.
Miao, 2015. Oil and gold leaf on canvas, 100 x 70 cm.
Wambele, 2015. Oil on canvas, 90 x 60 cm.
Legong, 2015. Oil on canvas, 60 x 40 cm.
Lehuang, 2015. Oil on canvas, 30 x 20 cm.
Cinnabari, 2015. Oil on canvas, 100 x 80 cm.
Mitsuye, 2015. Oil and acrylic on canvas, 80 x 150 cm.
Documentation from the exhibition Nap Of The Earth, at the Art Yourself Gallery, in Bucharest, 2015.