Painting is undoubtedly the most important cultural activity through which humanity has produced images throughout history. And images have reflected lived time and have been intended to persist, to endure over time, to resist oblivion and evanescence. Before the advent of photography, which presented itself as a technology capable of condensing temporal duration into a frozen instant, a second, it was painting that marked, captured and stored time. But painting is also able to expand time, to bring different times together, to destabilize the linear flow of the temporal flux. Painting is, in other words, intrinsically heterochronic.

Dan Voinea paints movement, separating duration into distinct instants without, however, exposing a “decisive moment”, like that of the photographer Henri Cartier Bresson, in other words, an exemplary action. He uses painting, like the chronophotographic devices of the early 20th century, to reveal what the human eye is unable to record at the speed at which our everyday experience usually unfolds. In other words, his painting captures and expands temporally what lies between the seconds: the moments of uncertainty, the moments of fragility, the moments of indecision. The postures of his characters are frozen, cut out of a flow of action, so that they can be examined. Taken serially, they reveal an existential reflection on individual freedom and constraints. His images are therefore both time-images and effect-images.

The sense of enclosure experienced in the spaces he paints, at times precise and chromatically exuberant, at others dull and earthy, generates emotions such as anxiety, anger and helplessness. These emotions run through the frames in which the human figures perform, depicted captive in intimate spaces – apartment blocks, workshops, confined spaces. His painting convincingly conveys the fragility of the human being – all the more so because it is associated with masculinity in these images. It reminds us not only of the precariousness of the artist’s condition in society, but also of the moments of crisis that each of us can face. In this context, painting presents the unrepresentable. In this way, however, the pictorial image tames reality when its psychically experienced coherence risks falling apart, making it bearable again.

Dan Voinea (b. 1970, Brasov) is an artist who lives and works in Craiova, Romania. The dreamlike paintings of Romanian artist Dan Voinea exhibit the past and present in works that are at times alienating, at times disorienting, and at times foreboding but always powerfully rendered; the result is a body of work that is both ominous and nostalgic. Voinea blends traditional and contemporary practices in his emotional pieces—building scenes by staging live models, taking pictures of various of their moves and interactions, then painting using an old master’s technique. At a first glance there is an eerie tone underpinning these works, yet longer one’s gaze lingers on these ambiguous surfaces, mysterious depths and bold perspectives herald a life-affirming uplift.