A mixed media work in which actual rust — produced by attaching steel wool to the canvas surface and allowing it to oxidise over several months — provides both the texture and the colour of the principal visual field. The painted passages work around and through the rusted areas rather than over them.
The work raises a question the painter considers genuinely unresolved: is this painting or process? Both are present, and neither is sufficient on its own. The rust continues to develop after the work leaves the studio.
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.
