A painting made after visiting a travelling fair on the outskirts of Constanța — not a representation of what was seen but a painting of how it was remembered several days later, with the image already transformed by sleep and distance. The bright colours of the original were muted into something stranger.
Acrylic's fast drying time suited the pace at which this kind of painting needed to be made — quickly and without revision, before the remembered image could settle into something more manageable and less true.
About the artist
Stefan Niculescu works fast and on instinct — each painting begins without a plan and the final composition emerges from a process of addition and removal that he describes as a conversation rather than a construction. The surfaces are dense with incident: marks that have been made and partly erased, colours that surface from beneath others, edges that refuse to stay placed.
His work sits at the boundary between abstract expressionism and surrealism, drawing energy from both without belonging fully to either. He has exhibited extensively in Romania and has shown work at fairs in Vienna and Warsaw. Based in Constanța, he maintains a studio overlooking the Black Sea — a condition that inevitably enters the work.
