I am always drawn to the façades of buildings, with their balconies, their windows, and whatever might be peaking from there. Andrei Tomeci’s work compresses the experience of traversing Bucharest into a series of images. 

What strikes me most is the way the work exposes the architecture of collective living. The apartments resemble stacked matchboxes, the concrete boxes that shape everyday life. In Bucharest, there is a long-standing tendency to reinforce and renovate only the public-facing façade, the one turned toward the boulevard, while the back and sides of the building remain in a state of disrepair. 

This other zone is veiled with two kinds of protective mesh: one that conjures the illusion of a firm, orderly exterior (whose elegance contradicts the reality of the block it conceals), and another that can no longer conceal the desolation beneath. The interior becomes visible, and an unintended transparency reveals the fragile infrastructures of the home. The work thus stages a tension between the curated image we present to the city and the vulnerable, unpolished realities that lie just behind it.

(Text by Diana Baldovinescu)