Contemporary History Print

« My artistic exploration develops on two intertwined directions. The psychological impact of the image and the technical means to achieve an emotional response where different mediums are manipulated with a variety of tools and the random results of spontaneous gestures are then either enhanced or erased, scratched or diffused until they start to make sense in a story that evolves alongside with the composition itself. » Born on 5 June 1983, Dan Arcus graduated from the University of Art an Design of Cluj-Napoca in Romania, where he followed the decorative arts program specializing in fashion design. After a few years of activity in the Romanian fashion scene in Bucharest he decided to enrich his life experience and moved to Brussels in Belgium. While preoccupied by the means of survival in a new society and culture he realized that painting and drawing were omnipresent in his life since childhood so he decided to focus on exploring these mediums and in time he managed to book his first exhibition in an art gallery. His works are now part of more than 150 private collections around the world, and evolved from statement portraits to elaborate figurative compositions, where the viewers are invited to question the given reality and pass the information through their own experience and social context. In the beginning his works were mainly pastel and charcoal on paper where colour was treated like an accidental intervention. Today he is developing several series in a variety of mediums including oil, acrylic, pastel, charcoal, ink and he explores the interaction between these mediums, where the unexpected results are used as a pretext for a figurative or abstract composition.