The limestone quarry near Dobrogea was the starting point — its geometry of cut planes and industrial intervention in natural rock gave the painting a structural logic that was subsequently pushed away from representation into abstraction. What remains of the original subject is a sense of weight and mineral temperature.
The mixed media surface — sand, gesso, and acrylic — gives the painting a physical presence that relates to its geological subject. The pale ochres and blue-greys in the final state are the colours the quarry actually was, even if the quarry is no longer there as an image.
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.
