The Scents No Longer Make His Nostrils Twitch
Adrian Ganea
05.06 - 04.07.2026
Press release in English: The Scents No Longer Make His Nostrils Twitch_Press Release_ENG
Press release in Romanian: The Scents No Longer Make His Nostrils Twitch_Comunicat_RO
We are pleased to announce The Scents No Longer Make His Nostrils Twitch, a solo exhibition of new works by the Cluj-based artist Adrian Ganea. This marks the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery.
Please join us for the exhibition opening on Friday, 5 June, at 7 pm.
In Arthur Rimbaud’s “The Sleeper in the Valley”, a young soldier lies resting in a sunlit meadow. Nature appears calm and generous, until the poem’s final line reveals the two red holes in his side. Sleep turns into death. Pastoral landscape becomes battlefield. Taking its title from Arthur Rimbaud’s poem, The Scents No Longer Make His Nostrils Twitch explores the uneasy terrain between war, sleep, death, and ecological renewal.
Drawing on references that range from French Renaissance emblems and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to paintings and photographs of sleeping soldiers, studies of sunflowers, and contemporary techno-political imaginaries, the exhibition examines how “hope of another life” persist amid destruction. Resurrection rarely appears as a simple reversal of death. Alchemical transformations, scientific experiments, cryogenic preservation, nationalist promises of rebirth, and ecological cycles all imagine return as a complex process of recomposition. Something survives, but never unchanged.
Using dismantled military supplies and surplus materials, dormant seeds, sand gathered from archeological graves and recycled materials, the works consider how dreams of resurrection continue to shape collective desires. Anthropomorphic plant figures seem less like combatants than bodies suspended between catastrophe and recovery. Rather than depicting resurrection as a triumphant return, the exhibition approaches it as an uncertain state of latency. New beginnings emerge not from heroic acts, but from interruption, sleep, and decay.
If war seeks to organize bodies toward destruction, sleep remains one of its persistent refusals. The sleeping figures gathered here withdraw from action, command, and productivity. Like Rimbaud’s conscript resting in the valley, they occupy an ambiguous threshold where dreams, death, and renewal become difficult to distinguish. In this suspended landscape, resurrection is neither miracle nor destiny, but a lingering desire that continues to shape how futures can be imagined.
Adrian Ganea (b.1989, Târgu Mureș) lives and works in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. He was trained as a set designer and his work involves fabricating fictitious worlds, building environments and assembling simulations. His main field of work is performing arts with a specific focus on digital culture.