I grew up in Bucharest, trained in Graphic Arts at the University of Art and Design Ioan Andreescu in Cluj-Napoca, and spent over a decade working in design and UX before returning to painting. That detour was not a detour. Working inside the systems that produce attention and desire taught me how images are built to feel inevitable. That is exactly what I paint about.

I paint hyperrealistic portraits borrowed from advertising and cinema, for people who sense that images shape their desires before they have a chance to decide, so they can finally see that mechanism clearly.

The figures appear familiar and seductive. But they are constructed surfaces, places where desire, identity, and cultural expectation meet. The gold backgrounds reference Byzantine and Renaissance icon painting deliberately. Where devotional images once structured collective belief and directed the gaze toward the sacred, commercial images now do the same thing. They shape desire, define taste, produce emotional response. From sacred image to consumer image. From altar to advertisement.

My ongoing series, Subtitled Bodies, takes this further by introducing text directly into the painted image. A simple subtitle can completely change how we read a face, a gesture, a body. The same image. Different words. Different feeling. Because images do not just reflect reality. They construct it.

This matters now because we are living inside the most image-saturated moment in human history. Every surface is optimized to produce a feeling. Every scroll is designed to shape a want. Most of it happens below awareness. Painting slows that down long enough to see it.