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Exhibition: Beyond Surfaces
Artist: Alexander Tinei
Curator: Isabelle Bernini
Opening：2024.10.14(Mon.)
Duration: 2024.10.14-2024.10.20 (Only by Appointment)
Location: Espace Structure Primaire 27 rue Jacques Cottin 93500 PANTIN
Dominated by bold, sometimes saturated colours, Alexander Tinei’s paintings form an apparently unstable assemblage: the figures – mostly solitary – seem to get lost in their environment in such a way that we can only catch them and lose them again immediately. The silhouettes are as much imbued with the openwork background as they are detached from it, asserting their posture in a shifting context. The painting is thus made of successive layers, rethinks, underlying lines, reworked passages… These principles of composition give rise to an overall harmony that is never closed in on itself, that never creates a definitive impression. In Tinei’s paintings, things seem about to happen, or at least are in the process of becoming. Like his characters, adolescents or young adults, who stare at the viewer with their blue-rimmed eyes. Caught in an ambivalent silence, it is their transitory state that shines through these linear geometries and colored planes. Their presence is almost ghostly, as if altered by an environment that marks their own inner world. At this time of life when emotions are heightened, the loss of ideals meets the sometimes brutal reality of a world that is imploding and increasingly fragmented. Certainties no longer exist.![]()
©HdM GALLERY
Ghost of Kyiv, oil on canvas, 200x150cm, 2022-2024If this way of representing youth is notably linked to the artist's childhood experience during the Soviet era, we can also feel, through their attitude of defiance, the alienation experienced in recent years, in a threatening climate caused by wars, pandemics, natural disasters... There is an existentialist dimension in these visions of being faced with nothingness and the absurd.![]()
©HdM GALLERY
The Socialist, oil on canvas, 140x100cm, 2024
Tinei makes his figures all the more spectral and melancholic as they also resonate with the general dematerialization of things, the great digitalization of images… They are as many souls wandering in the virtual flow that now governs social relations. Thus, through these forms that are sketched in broad strokes in Tinei’s painting, we glimpse the quest for immediacy (the instantaneous image, immediately replaced) that is now the dominant model. His painting, inspired by the collage technique that combines the figurative and the non-figurative on the same plane, is born from random visual encounters that collide. The white of the canvas then takes on an important place: visual breathing, it allows us to focus our gaze on this series of colored areas, and to avoid perspective effects. Tinei operates here a play between surface and depth that hides and reveals simultaneously. His characters, erected in the form of almost traditional portraits, become icons of the 21st century, sailing in parallel worlds, both flat and infinitely moving.![]()
©HdM GALLERY
Seafront, oil on canvas, 200x140cm, 2024
In these variable-colored spaces, the characters confidently reflect their nonchalant attitude to the world, there is a certain affirmation in these apparently nonchalant postures, without a goal or even a desire for utopia. The poses, sometimes with crossed arms and outstretched legs, seem to be defensive responses to an overwhelming and often incomprehensible world. The blue lines that run along their arms, the makeup running down an almost translucent skin, are like so many signs of the incarnation of a desire not to conform to the conviction of the masses.If they remain elusive, they are no less unruly, they give off a dull anger. Tinei's paintings are ultimately, in an increasingly fragmented society and in the light of an already announced disappearance of the world, also a reflection on resistance and persistence. In attempting to examine the foundation of interpersonal relationships and social reflexes, they offer a reflection on the place of the individual in the grand scheme of things, and a celebration of the power of painting as a means of capturing the soul of an era.![]()
©HdM GALLERYShame, Graphite on paper, 102x72cm, 2024
Alexander Tinei, born in1967, Căușeni, Moldova. He lives and works in Budapest. Alexander Tinei's artistic practice is characterized by a remarkable mastery of pictorial technique and a profound exploration of the human condition. Tinei excels in creating striking portraits that seem to capture the soul of his subjects. He uses an intense color palette and meticulous detail to create works that exude an aura of unsettling realism, while subtly playing with elements of the imaginary.One of the distinguishing features of Alexander Tinei's work is his ability to interweave elements of the absurd and the unreal into scenes that, at first glance, seem rooted in reality. He thus creates a subtle dialogue between the real and the surreal, inviting the viewer to question the boundaries between these two worlds. His canvases are often inhabited by characters with bewitching expressions, evoking a complex range of emotions and feelings.
Alexander Tinei's contribution to today's art lies in his willingness to depict cyberspace characters, figures with very real, human features that exist only in this online universe. For Tinei, today's youth seems more in dialogue and connection with these fictional spaces than reality, and his works bear witness to this.
Alexander Tinei has been the subject of numerous exhibitions in Japan, Hungary, France, Greece, the United States, Germany and Russia. He is considered by many artists to be the father of the Moldavian realist school.
