The chessboard was chosen as a starting point because its geometry is already a resolved compositional system — the painting explores what happens when that system is subjected to the fragmentation and multiple-viewpoint logic of cubism. The result is neither representational nor abstract but somewhere between.
The black passages were applied last, glazed rather than applied opaquely, so that the earlier colour work shows through and prevents the darks from deadening the surface. The white squares are not white but a complex mixture of warm and cool.
About the artist
Alexandru Popa's paintings take their structure from the analytical tradition of cubism — multiple viewpoints compressed onto a single surface, forms that reveal their underlying geometry rather than concealing it. The work is not historical pastiche but a live investigation of what that pictorial logic can still produce.
He trained in Bucharest and continued his studies in Berlin, where he currently divides his time. The paintings are large in ambition and careful in execution — Alexandru believes that formal rigour and genuine feeling are not in tension but are, in fact, the same thing approached from different directions. He does not accept commissions.
