The Old Trees exhibition by the photographer Florin Ghenade at Biju Gallery represents an iteration, a selection adapted to the gallery space, part of a greater project which was presented in multiple locations over time, like The National Romanian Peasant Museum (Bucharest), The Romanian Cultural Institute in Warsaw (Poland), The Art Museum, The Palace of Culture in Iași, Contemporary Art Ruhr (Essen, Germany) and so on. Florin Ghenade has been photographing old trees in Romania for over six years during his travels, as symbols of memory and temporality, creating a series of photographic frames in which the aesthetic and the significance of the subject are equally important. The images are documenting a concrete reality, supported by known or unknown histories, cumulating both a scheduled process of riding through the country and a scenic one by directing the light around the subject, curdling the photographic compositions. Florin Ghenade’s trees assert themselves into the space like memory totems, evoking feelings of both mystery and familiarity, encrypting elements which the onlooker discovers only at a second glance and second reading of the image. A key reference for the photographer’s artistic practice is Giordano Bruno, who perceives and understands light as being more than a solar source, describing it as an invisible light, dispersed throughout the cosmos and planted everywhere, allowing us to see absent, invisible things. Another reference is Caravaggio and his specific chiaroscuro, a landmark for using light to showcase a moment and the experience of a moment. Florin Ghenade works with an analogous camera, in a large format, Linhof Technika 3, with a v4x5” film plan, a negative that allows the recording of a larger quantity of information that it can be technically perceived about the photographed subject on a first glance. For the images in this project, the exposure times were between 3 and 20 minutes, depending on the location and technical conditions, the necessary time for the distribution of the light on the photographed tree. This makes the image more than the recording of a passing instant, it is a series of events and moments unfolding through time and captured in an image. The artist conveys this about the artistic process behind the compositions: "The night opened a world of possibilities. Firstly, it offered the background that I needed, and in counterpoint the tree, artificially illuminated by large spotlights, gained volume, shape and textures that I could not have imagined before. It became an entirely different being, another spirit than under daylight, when it is an all-too-common sight unable to remove us from our daily rhythm so that we stop and admire it. On the other hand, the night casts darkness upon the familiar. And darkness begets mystery, associated in human culture with the occult, fear, shadow, the old and the profound. But the night also (or perhaps by virtue of it) is a boundless time, transforming and revealing hidden things and possibilities. It is the time and place of stories and legends." An important element that materializes the conceptual under layer of the images, is the report between man and nature/natural and the human reaction/perception of the natural. The trees reach such old ages due also to the synergy between how man works the land and his relation to nature. Thus, the concept of nature is not only open to interpretation but, depending on our experience and understanding, it is variable. Another angle of perception and understanding is the profound change of the Romanian social, economic, and political context over the past 30 years. The color black becomes a nodal point of tension in relation to time as the photo eventually offers the spatial image of an environment, with its own time dimension. Another conceptual reference gravitates around Roland Barthes, who defines photography as a retention of the time which has passed. Directing light and darkness in a photographic composition outlines a key to reading the subject, challenging the act of looking and keeping it alive. Thus, the old trees captured by Florin Ghenade become, technically, the result of a photographic process that is laboriously and methodically built (which could also be perceived as a stage act) and are conceptually the witnesses of the harmony that exists between man and landscape. In the process of artistic and curatorial research, Old Trees brought together interdisciplinary perspectives on the subject, among which those offered by: Tibor Hartel – conference lecturer at Babeş-Bolyai University, Hubertus v. Amelunxen – professor of cultural studies, Tom Joye - expert in managing veteran trees in urban environments, Simona Popescu - writer, Diana Culescu – landscape designer, Ioana Popescu – anthropologist. They also published an album that shows the complexity of the subject, both aesthetically and conceptually, entitled: Old Trees. Let there be darkness yet let there be light! containing the contributions of: Matei Câlția, Florin Ghenade, Wilhelm Lehmann, Alexandra Manole, Gellu Naum, Simona Popescu. Short Biography: FLORIN GHENADE (born 1982, Roman, Romania) is a photographer who lives and works in Bucharest. He graduated from the National Art University in Bucharest, the Dynamic Image and Photography Department. Before choosing the Fine Arts Faculty, he attended classes at the Faculty of Philosophy in Bucharest. Known for the project Old Trees, exhibited at the National Romanian Peasant Museum, a visual documentation of natural and patrimony values, a story of light and darkness, Florin Ghenade is interested in photography as a media, offering projects that speak about the image aesthetic. Photography, in this case, is not instantaneous, a spontaneously captured moment, but the result of a search, an artistic process that is both intellectual – the concept and technical – the execution. Within this idea, nature and landscape are represented by defining elements, seemingly removed from the natural environment and retold through the moments that characterize each one particularly. He has had exhibitions in Bucharest, Cluj-Napoca, Șona (Făgăraș), Timișoara, and his works were part of the Romanian pavilion at the Scenography Quadrennial in Prague. The project Old Trees is exhibited in Essen, Germany at Contemporary Art Ruhr.