What Falls from the Sky Is What You Throw into the Sky

Usually minimal in form, Miklós Onucsán’s conceptual interventions are concerned with daily shifts and, on a broader scale, with the cultural and social fractures generated by Eastern European politics, the collapse of utopias, and the shortcomings and ideals of past and actual political regimes, including his home country Romania’s transition from communism to a capitalist system in the 1990s. Embedded in a historical context, Onucsán’s works often bear titles that are more than mere names: they act as an entry point to the works’ conceptual frame and to their possible interpretations. Using language as a material, the artist engages with semantics, verbalism and syntax as a way to address and bring to the surface issues that go unnoticed in everyday life.

"What Falls from the Sky Is What You Throw into the Sky" is a neon light installation of a truism hovering below the ceiling. Engaged in writing both meaning-wise and visually, this work by Miklós Onucsán presents us with an atemporal sentence written with contemporary means (neon light), while conceptually taking us back to a time before text and image became separated. Representative of the many works in which Onucsán uses language as a working material starting from the very titles of his works, this installation invites the viewer to undertake an unusual perspective by looking upwards, towards the ceiling, in order to gaze at an artwork. Linking ground and sky with a self-explanatory and thought provoking sentence related to the law of gravity, "What Falls from the Sky Is What You Throw into the Sky" provides an idea with a material form whilst reorienting perception. The concept finds its concrete form in neon, a material conventionally used for signage.