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, and that is exactly what I paint about.

I paint because I am struck by the unconscious power of images. The way certain pictures stay with us, quietly shaping how we see ourselves, what we want, and who we think we are.

Advertising, cinema, and digital media have constructed a visual language that feels natural, even inevitable. But it is deeply designed. I paint hyperrealistic, poster-like portraits that borrow from these visual systems. The figures appear familiar and seductive, but they are also constructed surfaces, places where desire, identity, and cultural expectation converge. I am interested in the tension between what we see and how it influences us.

The gold backgrounds in my work reference the tradition of icon painting, the gilded ground of Byzantine and Renaissance devotional imagery. I use this reference deliberately. Where icons once structured collective belief and directed the gaze toward the sacred, commercial images now perform a similar function. They shape desire, define taste, and produce emotional response. I am interested in this continuity: from sacred image to consumer image, from altar to advertisement.

My ongoing series, Subtitled Bodies, extends this investigation by introducing text directly into the painted image. A simple subtitle can change how we read an image and what we feel. Across my work, I explore how images do not just reflect reality. They construct it.