Matei Toșa (b. 1993) lives and works in Cluj. He is a graduate of the Graphic Design Department of the University of Art and Design, Cluj and one of the founders and coordinators of MATCA space. The ordinary and the everyday play a central role in his art, in which he ironically constructs a reality in which strange situations arise within quiet neighborhoods or contexts in which nothing ever seems to happen. The artist is mainly interested in how a given thing can express different particularities if its rule is changed or if an error is added to its pattern, and in his works the generation of new meanings or fiction is developed through the whole experiment of layering, almost as if one were preparing a collage. Concerned with finding an answer to what makes him draw (or why he does so), his instincts derive from his earlier experiences of working in and growing up with sculpture, where he developed his attention to space and form in relation to the environment – his surroundings – and to his early memories.

“*Memory is not a perfect processor and is affected by many factors. The means by which information is encoded, stored, and retrieved can all be corrupted.*

Through Objects From My Memories I try to explore such concepts as memory and perception by combining key elements from my childhood with other ordinary places that are still a part of my life. In a way, showing the passage of time. Every landscape I look at is an empty background ready for me to fill in with an action. This was an exercise I used to do as a child when I was bored at school or in different places. These objects with which I fill these landscapes are tangible artifacts from my past, and in the past, these were the means through which I brought stories from my imagination to life. Objects From My Memories is a series of personal artifacts that are intended to illustrate how memory is affected, by the ways in which we store information, through their altered appearance resulting from their being used as the basis for this body of work. Changing an object’s natural form in a way that slightly alters its appearance imitates the process through which information is stored erroneously. Objects, in this context, can also be just images I daydreamed about, not necessarily only physical objects. Nothing is complete, and most things change via the loss or transforming of little bits and pieces, in an infinitely changeable past, from which almost nothing concrete remains.”

(Matei Toșa)