A portrait of an eighty-year-old man reading — his face in three-quarter view, his attention entirely elsewhere. The quality of stillness in a person absorbed by a book was the subject that initiated this painting, and the book was chosen as a prop specifically because it redirected the subject's self-consciousness away from being seen.
The painting was made across six sessions over three weeks. The hands holding the book were the last things resolved — their particular disposition required many adjustments before they achieved the settled, unself-conscious quality that the face already had.
About the artist
Florin Iliescu's figurative paintings are focused on the unguarded moment — a reader absorbed in a book, a worker on a break, a face in the moment before a decision is made. He is not interested in the performed or the posed but in the self that surfaces when the subject is not thinking about being seen.
His abstract paintings exist in a separate but related practice, pursuing the same interest in revelation rather than performance. He uses mixed media in these works, combining paint with materials that carry their own histories. He is based in Bucharest and accepts commissions for figurative portraits.
