The Inevitability of Change

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Florin Hategan, “Wetland 2,” 2016

linocut (hand printed), 40” x 100”

Florin Hategan’s dark, moody and meticulously crafted prints illustrate one of life’s most painful but illuminating truths: the inevitability of change. As an artist and a civil engineer, the Romanian-born Hategan looks at the transformations around him with both fascination and a methodical, dispassionate eye. His show, Wetlands, at Edmonton’s Harcourt House Gallery until May 12, is punctuated by grids, numbers and geometric ellipses set against the backdrop of vast marshes littered with industrial debris.

Most of the rubbish is hidden amidst rocks and vegetation. As in the I Spy children’s books or Renaissance paintings laden with concealed symbols, it can be difficult to discern the manufactured objects. Only in a few places, like the lower right corner of Wetland 2, does the geometry of a half-submerged industrial component stand out. Once useful and carefully crafted, it is now unrecognizable. Like the wetlands that slowly reclaim abandoned industrial sites, human refuse undergoes a reverse process, inexorably disintegrating back into nature.

The prints are inspired by two sites. One is the Kortright Centre for Conservation, a natural oasis amidst encroaching housing developments in the suburban sprawl northwest of Toronto, where the artist lives. The other is an unnamed, once-scenic river in a town with a cement factory. For a brief time, the townspeople had good jobs. Schools, roads and bridges were built. But the business soon went bankrupt, leaving an excavated riverbank and water too polluted for swimming.

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Florin Hategan, “Subject 06,” 2014

linocut (hand printed), 85” x 40”

Interspersed with the horizontal wetlands vistas are life-sized vertical images of people. Some are from a series that depicts nameless teenagers, a brief but intense stage of life Hategan often thinks about. For him, it’s a golden time when it seems dreams can come true and all things are possible. The teens, undergoing their own fast-paced transformations, stand like sentinels watching the environment around them both decay and regenerate.

Collectively, Hategan’s prints trigger a range of conflicting emotions: they are at once implicitly passionate, yet they resist judgment. It’s as if Hategan has seamlessly fused the artist’s creative energies and the engineer’s detached, analytical worldview. Like the still, poised figure in Subject 06, viewers become dispassionate witnesses to relentless change. But instead of discomfort at watching the familiar dissolve, the shift becomes a part of a natural order. The cycle of loss and renewal is no more subject to moral judgment than the seasons. ■

Wetlands is on view at Edmonton’s Harcourt House from March 29 to May 12, 2018.