HdM gallery is excited to show a selection of oil on canvases and work on papers by the Moldovan artist Alexander Tinei. The artist can be grouped to a wider movement of Eastern European Painting as a part of the New Figurative Painting. The show showcases Tinei’s colourful portraits alongside a selection of graphite figure drawings.

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. In Tinei’s paintings, things seem about to happen, or at least are in the process of becoming. His figures, caught in an ambivalent silence, it is their transitory state that shines through these linear geometries and colored planes. 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. Tinei makes his figures all the more spectral and melancholic. 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. If 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. 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.