'Stone Nocturnes: The Insomnia Suite' New Sculptures by Cristian Ianculescu

Aurelia Gallery

Reception with Cristian Ianculescu on Friday, October 3, 2025, from 5:00 to 8:00 p.m.

Artist StatementStone Nocturnes maps the wakeful hours when feelings sharpen and thoughts loop. In this new body of work, nocturnal states are given weight and contour: desire tugging, envy flickering, futures rehearsed and resisted. The 2025 Insomnia Suite, carved largely in Tennessee pink marble, names the moods we often hide: envy, lust, obsession, anxiety about what lies ahead. Around them, avian figures arrive like messengers at the window. Works such as Shelter, shift the register from agitation to attention, proposing care, exchange, and listening. Cristian Ianculescu approaches sculpture as an active dialogue with primordial matter. Trained by time and pressure, stone and wood are not simply mediums here; they are collaborators carrying deep memory and archetypal charge. His forms emerge through disciplined subtraction, so that a single opening, seam, or fold becomes the work’s inner voice. The resulting silhouettes - ovals, columns, crescents, beaks - hold complex feeling with deliberate restraint. This ethic extends to materials: Ianculescu uses Tennessee pink marble blocks salvaged from the former Australian Embassy in Washington, D.C., inviting a civic history to reappear as living form. Born in Romania in 1965 and working in Washington, D.C., Ianculescu’s practice is grounded in clarity of line and a belief that reduction can open onto the universal. His sculptures read across time: contemporary in their economy, yet, anchored in the timeless language of stone. The continuity between ancient substance and present feeling animates Stone Nocturnes. The exhibition sequences materials - marble with alabaster, calcite with wood and basalt - so that density, translucence, and grain function like movements in a score. Dark grounds set off pale masses; precise edges meet hand-worked textures; voids collect light. Seen together, the works chart the passage of a night. What begins in rumination resolves into offering. The birds keep watch, and columns anchor the space. Stone Nocturnes invites viewers to recognize what they hold after midnight, and what they are finally ready to release. In a restless era, these sculptures are instruments of attention: quiet, exacting, and human in scale, made to be met more than once.