What follows descent? If the first part of Dostoevsky’s novella “Notes from Underground” lingers in the subterranean recesses of thought, the second, “Apropos of the Wet Snow,” forces us into collision with the surface. It is a world of humiliation and confrontation, where every gesture is sharpened by the sting of rejection and the damp heaviness of disillusion. Here, the underground does not remain hidden. It seeps upward, messy, unruly, and uncontainable.
This exhibition is not a quiet meditation, but a rupture. A visceral reckoning with the fragility of our illusions and the brutality of their collapse. The works are raw, unflinching, sometimes violent in their insistence. In them, with materials and subjects that toil with a sense of permanence, questions arise. In each flicker of neon and stroke of the paintbrush, we ask ourselves: are we witnessing an ending, the disintegration of the narratives we have clung to, or the tentative beginnings of something unformed? Like snow that both buries and dissolves, the images and forms insist on ambiguity, on the coexistence of ruin and possibility.
Dostoevsky’s narrator sought dignity in cruelty, solace in self-sabotage. That psychology echoes chillingly in the crises of today, with wars waged with impunity, perpetuations of systemic inequalities, fractured truths, and societies buckling under the weight of their contradictions. The wet snow becomes a mirror. Whether through paint, clay, video, or the plethora of other media presented here, they too reflect the absurd theater of our failures and the lingering hope that something might yet emerge from the slush.
Rather than offering answers, these works sharpen the questions. They probe at the wound where control gives way to chaos, where seeking connection is a pathway for alienation, where private despair collides with collective tragedy. They remind us that the underground is not only within us but all around us. We are aware of their pressing, urgent, and impossible-to-ignore presence. If the first part of Notes from Underground invited us to descend, this second part insists that we stand in the storm, face the thaw, and endure the weight of the wet snow. —Charles Moore
Notes from Underground, Part II: Wet Snow is on view through November 30.2025, SAC Bucharest, 5th Gen. H. M. Berthelot Street, Bucharest, Romania and is curated by Charles Moore & Alex Radu with artists: Carlos Amorales, Simona Andrioletti, Andrius Arutiunian, Justin Baroncea & Cristian Matei, Yael Bartana, Gisela Colon, Nicolae Comanescu, Suzana Dan, Dimitrie Luca Gora, Dumitru Gorzo, Anne Imhof, Rusudan Khizanishvili, Ayoung Kim, Miler Lagos, Charmaine Poh, Buket Savci, Bosco Sodi, Mircea Suciu, Philip Topolovac, Jorinde Voigt