"Masks" Drawing

Between Heart and Mind ​ Every time I touch the palette, I return to myself — to the one who might have vanished had I not once opened my heart to art. My work is a journey of falls, ascents, and healing, where paint becomes alchemy, transforming personal experience into universal emotion. My name is Olesea. I am an artist from Moldova, working at the intersection of figurative painting and abstraction. The landscapes of the southeast, where I grew up, are not my subject but an impulse: their contrasts of light, textures, and sharp lines form the foundation of my visual language, bridging the rigor of academic tradition with rebellion against literalism. After graduating in scenography from the Academy of Music, Theatre, and Fine Arts (Chisinau), I learned to craft narratives — now they live in my paintings, turning canvases into spaces for dialogue between the viewer and the idea. My shift from realism to abstraction was not a break but a liberation. By dismantling form, I sought to express what lies beyond the visible: the tension between human fragility and resilience, inner conflicts, and strength. Thick impasto techniques, glazes, bold palette knife strokes, and delicate brushwork — these layers capture life’s contradictions. Blurred backgrounds dissolve to illuminate what matters: the interplay of light and shadow, the gesture of an archetypal figure, the choreography of symbols in an ephemeral void. By stripping away the superfluous, I leave room for the viewer’s question: what remains when form disappears? Each of my works is a stage where texture becomes metaphor. Inspired by the harmony of antiquity, Warhol’s pop art, Marina Abramović raw vulnerability, and the quiet dramaturgy of theatrical space, I hybridize symbols to provoke a confrontation with the self. My works are held in private collections across Europe, the UK, and the US, and have been exhibited in galleries that value the dialogue between tradition and avant-garde. But what matters most to me is to create a space where the viewer, like my past self, permits oscillation — between heart and mind, control and surrender, the earthly and the boundless.