Even though we tend to overlook the objects around us, today’s visual artists seem to intentionally seek them out. They take them out of context, reinvent them, or even layer them over something else. In this way, the banal becomes a bearer of meaning, and the everyday gains a different density. The current WIN Gallery collection has a strong creative center around which works gravitate, transforming daily observation into artistic expression. Through subtle gestures or elaborate compositions, Marijana and Relu Bițulescu manage to elevate ordinary objects to the status of symbols, constructing visual stories that challenge the gaze and reconfigure meaning. The transformation of the ordinary object into a narrative element, whether it is a spoon, a cup, or a shoe, is not a simple exercise in style. It is a process of recovery, reinterpretation, and sometimes poetic resistance. Something shifts from functional to symbolic, from private to public, from insignificant to essential.

The Object as Memory

In contemporary art, objects without an apparent aesthetic dimension come to acquire a deeply symbolic function when used not only as raw material but as carriers of memory. They become extensions of biography, affective relics that can tell stories without words, building a bridge between the artist’s intimacy and the viewer. Memory is not represented only through image or word, but through the traces left on the surface of objects, from a worn fabric, an old toy, or fragments of furniture. In this context, artists transform everyday objects into elements of visual language, marking them with various personal experiences that viewers themselves come to link with new lines of significance. The gallery or exhibition space thus becomes not just a space of display, but a territory of confession.

A defining example is Geta Brătescu, who transforms her studio into a living space, almost ritualistic, where the artistic act becomes a form of daily existence, and collage a method of self-narration. Geta Brătescu’s very life constituted a true gallery, the textiles, paper, threads, scraps of packaging, or fragments of old clothes not chosen by chance but extracted from immediate domestic life, charged with discreet intimacy. Her artistic practice does not pursue a grand aesthetic, but rather a personal, intuitive logic through which disparate fragments compose a mobile, fragile, and playful feminine identity.

For Louise Bourgeois, the object becomes a witness to a painful personal history. In the Cells series, the artist introduces old beds, broken mirrors, worn clothes, elements that compose a fragile decor yet loaded with emotional tension. The ordinary object thus becomes a catalyst of memory regardless of its personal or collective nature, memory that speaks of fragility, intimacy, and suffering. A bed is no longer just a place of rest but evokes illness, abandonment, vulnerability. A piece of clothing becomes symbolic skin, bearing traces of suffering and loss. A broken mirror does not just reflect the viewer’s image but fragments it, forcing them to see ruptures and dislocations. The works Cell (Glass Spheres and Hands), Cell (Eyes and Mirrors), or Cell (Clothes) are concrete examples in which objects do not communicate through their aesthetic value, but through the emotional tension they trigger. Often, the spaces are constructed so that the viewer cannot fully enter, being blocked by an iron mesh, or by the fact that the objects are placed at an inaccessible angle, emphasizing the idea of withheld intimacy, of trauma that is not fully revealed but merely insinuated.

A final example that I care about very much comes from the Lusitanian space, from Portugal, where artist Ricardo Passos brought the theme of memory to public attention through the exhibition Forget Me Not, in 2021. The exhibition explicitly addressed the theme of memory, with works using the image of the doll to express the idea of abandonment. Among the displayed works, the one I constantly return to is a hollow porcelain doll, legless, tattooed, from whose abdomen emerge butterflies made of glass shards. A complex and complete visual metaphor, a direct reference even to Alzheimer’s-type illnesses, Ricardo Passos’s work shows how the fragility of the object can become an expression of a deep human fragility, that of a disintegrating identity, of memory breaking into fragments. In this sense, the object, once a toy and now a relic, becomes a memory-body, an extension of a personal or collective history that can no longer be told in words, but only in a silent and heartbreaking image.

The Object as Visual Metaphor

As we can see, when integrated into a work of art, the object can transcend its utilitarian or affective function and become a bearer of symbolic meanings, often difficult to translate into words. In this case, the object no longer evokes a direct experience, but becomes an instrument of visual thought, a metaphor through which the artist speaks about universal themes we have previously observed, from betrayal to faith or doubt, memory and fragility. The various materials (wood, metal, ceramic, etc.) are not randomly chosen either, as they are themselves laden with meanings and cultural associations.

A powerful example in this sense is the work The Last Supper by Relu Bițulescu, a sculptural collage in which 13 wooden spoons are arranged in a circle, suggesting the final meal Jesus shared with his apostles, as described in the Bible. Two details transform this composition into a visual metaphor: the first is the presence of a central bowl, as a symbolic axis of the act of communion, and the second is the position of one of the spoons, slightly advanced compared to the others. This minimal but tense discrepancy alludes to betrayal and the invisible fracture within the collective, that spoon in fact being Judas’s spoon. The fact that the entire ensemble is completely white annuls the particularity of the objects and even the identity of the participants, unifying them in a purified yet spectral vision, like an impersonal memory, a fresco of absence in which anyone can take a seat at the table.

In the same Christic line, the work The Suspicions of Adam includes an antique manual washing tray reused as a painting surface. On this unusual support, the artist depicts Adam looking suspiciously at the apple, a gaze that reinterprets the entire mythology of the fall. The washing tray, a symbol of cleansing and domestic routine, enters into ironic contrast with the original gesture of sin. Thus, the object used is not decorative, but becomes the very ground upon which meanings are negotiated: the banal becomes sacred, the everyday becomes a site of revelation, the formal and conceptual coherence of the work reaching a refined level, its harmony generating aesthetic pleasure both visually and intellectually, through the understanding of the metaphor proposed by Relu Bițulescu.

Through recontextualization, artists not only ennoble ordinary things but reactivate them, give them a second life, transform them into bearers of essential questions. When a spoon, a doll, or an old manual washing tray speak of betrayal, abandonment, or the fall, it means that the object has transcended its condition as a “thing” and has become a form of thought. And this form of thought does not always need explanations, because it acts directly on the affective memory and intuition of the viewer.

The transformed everyday banal gains an unexpected life, becoming the silent bearer of deep and universal stories.

Ph.D. Researcher Andrei FĂȘIE