THE FANTASTIC BELT
at
SANDWICH NEUROHOPE
in collaboration with PHARMAKON GALLERY
15.10 - 01.12.2025
opening hours: Wed. - Fri., 12-5 pm
with
Anca Bârjovanu (RO), Raymonde Beraud (UK/CYP), Iulia Bucureșteanu (RO), Liu Chuan (CN), Matei Dragomir (RO), Wassim El Hodayebi(NL/MA), Tijn Gerards(NL), Teodor Georgescu & Clara Caradimu (RO), Kexin Hao (CN/NL), Maria Carmen Sofronie (RO), Claudia Moraru (RO), Tudor Necula (RO), Andrei Nițu (RO), Daniela Pălimariu (RO), Erika Peucelle (HR), Sohyun Park (KR/NL), Menno Pasveer (NL), Feng Shan (CN), Christian Thomsen (DK), Andrei Tudoran (RO), Daniel Van Straalen (NL), Yunfeng (CN), Zhang Zhou (CN)
curated by
Christian Roncea & Zhou Yi
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The Fantastic Belt presents a constellation of works across painting, realism, abstraction, conceptual practices, and digital media, exploring what we might call the Vampire Renaissance: a rebirth that feeds on past lives to sustain the present. Where a previous generation’s aesthetic revival thrived on mechanical repetition, the Vampire Renaissance operates through seduction, dependency, and desire—an art that draws vitality from what it consumes.
Here, artists do not simply resurrect gestures or forms; they extract their essence, reanimating symbols and materials with new intention. Across historical and digital registers, craft meets algorithm, intuition meets code. What returns is not drained but charged—imbued with the bittersweet vitality of appropriation and transformation.
The term Renaissance is invoked not as a return to origins but as an eternal afterglow—a cycle of consumption and renewal. Works oscillate between sincerity and artifice, handmade intimacy and algorithmic precision. As Baudrillard might suggest, these images inhabit the afterlife of the real: forms survive by feeding on their own reflections, history continually reinfused with new blood.
The belt functions as a metaphor for this circulation: a connective tension linking what was thought finished, obsolete, or lost. Art no longer seeks beginnings or endings—it endures by feeding, transforming, and adapting.
The Fantastic Belt is an ecosystem of hauntings, where vitality and exhaustion, memory and desire, coexist in nocturnal harmony.
- text by Christian Roncea
Founded by neurosurgeons Dr. Dorin Bică and Dr. Ionuț Gobej, NeuroHope delivers excellence in minimally and ultra-minimally invasive endoscopic/keyhole neurosurgery and offers consultations across a wide spectrum of medical and surgical specialties, ensuring healthcare of the highest standards. The NeuroHope team unites physicians from 20 medical and surgical fields, adopting a multidisciplinary approach to diagnosing and treating patients’ conditions.
This event is part of the Program “Sandwich Grand Tour".
A cultural Program co-funded by the Administration of the National Cultural Fund.
The Program does not necessarily represent the position of the Administration of the National Cultural Fund. The AFCN is not responsible for the Project content or the manner in which the results of the Project may be used. These are entirely the responsibility of the funding recipient
