Liviu Alexa: "My angels smoke at the soul check-in"

A polar bear in tennis gear serves with a skull for a ball. A one-winged angel smokes bored next to the plane that takes souls to check-in. In the world of the artist Liviu Alexa, this is normality. The journalist who rummaged through Romanian corruption for almost 30 years has been painting for less than a year and already has four series, two of which are sold-out. He has no art school, nor does he want to be known for a certain style. But his style is obvious: he paints his soul with good and bad.

You have seen hundreds of galleries and many artists in the last ten years. What are you looking for in painting, if not representation?

Liviu Alexa: This world of art is a strange world: there are artists who paint pictures and there are artists who try to build a world, canvas after canvas, sculpture after sculpture, collage after collage.
For me, painting became, in a fairly short time, rather a problem of thinking than one of representation. I am no longer interested in reproducing reality, just as I do not want to simply invent spectacular images.
I strongly believe that my canvases must contain an idea and produce a state. Beyond what is actually seen on the surface of a painting, they must speak to you of an experience. Maybe about fear, maybe about abandonment, depression, tenderness, death, sexuality, memory or loss. I have no idea, I never think of anything in particular. The canvas and the colors are only the visible body of an experience that begins elsewhere, somewhere within me. In my past, in my nightmares, in my joys. Or in the epiphanies of two lei or in the deep ones I have when I smoke a cigarette or sit on the stoop.

Critics will want to put you in a category. If you had to do it yourself, what would it be?

Liviu Alexa: I don't know what category my art can be placed. If it's neo-expressionism or surrealism, if it's grotesque or maybe a little of the freedom of an outsider's art. However, if we are discussing finding a formula, I would say that I am somewhere near a narrative-symbolic neo-expressionism. Although I am more used to simple words and then I will tell you that I try a realism of the impossible everyday.
Why do I say this? Because in my paintings the impossible is perfect, it is natural.

A polar bear serving with a skull can also be read as gratuitous shock. Where is the border between sense and absurdity for the sake of absurdity?

Liviu Alexa: In my world, the meeting between things that in reality have no reason to meet is correct. Let the critics come and say that they put together mythology and consumerism, the sacred and the trivial, the tenderness and the grotesque, clichés of these three lei. But I am not interested in the absurd for the sake of the absurd. For me, the meeting of all the things I think and paint must produce a crack through which the idea can enter. Kind of like a sperm searching not for an egg but for meaning.

You often say that your paintings can be "read". How to read a canvas?

Liviu Alexa: There is a strong narrative character to my canvases. The gaze enters through a dominant character or object and then begins to discover other happenings, other clues, other contradictions. Because, in Alexa's universe, objects have equal rights with characters, they become relics of our time and then, somehow, each painting ends up functioning as a small autonomous mythology.

The colors have nothing to do with reality. What do they actually do?

Liviu Alexa: My art has more of a perspective affective than a geometric or academic one. My colors participate in a total derangement of the eye's bias. They do not exist as you see them in reality, they only express a psychic temperature. It's a contradiction that I assume and that I want to enhance, because we live, after all, in an era in which the catastrophe is consumed at the same time as an advertisement, in which the contemporary grotesque is no longer black, but colored and seductive.

Isn't this whole carnival in danger of slipping into pure irony?

Liviu Alexa: My cloths smell like carnival, but the base note is melancholy. And melancholy is an incredibly important ingredient for me. I would never want my works to become just exercises in sarcasm, because I always try to introduce gestures of tenderness, dependence, vulnerability or abandonment in the middle of the absurd. My characters, be they objects, people or invented creatures, all live in a disordered world, but somehow they keep touching each other, keep searching and trying to protect themselves, as if they don't want to lose the last vestige of humanity.

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]You came to painting from writing. How much of the writer remained in the painter?

Liviu Alexa: I have a vocabulary that crosses my mediums of expression for a long time, but I don't want its elements to ever become simple repetitive motifs. I want it to be a personal alphabet. My obsession for ideas, for this possibility to "read" an image, is also explained by the fact that I came to painting from writing. For me, the idea always precedes the image and I cannot completely separate the writer from the painter, because I have always worked with the same raw material: obsessions, memories, fears, questions, hysteria, fragments of life. becomes explicit, as the series draws its sap from my own published poems. But, mind you, I'm not trying to illustrate them. It would be too simple! My poetry is more of a reservoir from which I extract a state, a mental image, a contradiction or a wound and put it into another language. And then, often, a verse can occupy two meters of canvas. A metaphor can become a body.

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]Four series in less than a year. Most artists are looking for a recognizable signature. You?

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Liviu Alexa: In less than ten months I painted almost 80 canvases and built four distinct series: "We are the Apocalypse", "Filcai", "The daffodil lament" and "Sparrow Rapist". There are no variations on the same idea, and no mass production around a found formula that I take further, squeeze, as they say, and create my "style".
I'm dying with this style. I don't want to have style. I don't want to be compared to anyone, I don't look like anyone, believe me. I am Liviu Alexa, a human Rubik's cube, I have many colors and many surfaces. It's very hard to "do" me. When you think you've got me, I self-destruct and respawn with new soul colors.
Don't get me wrong. I have my own alphabet and carry it with me from one series to another. But the alphabet is not style. Style is a phrase you find once and keep repeating because it sells. I want the alphabet to remain and the grammar to change every time.
I don't want to be recognized for the "Alexa style", but I want to always try, to develop another mythology, another series of characters, another temperature, another conceptual core.

This rhythm inevitably raises a suspicion: don't "burn" too much fast?

Liviu Alexa: In the last few months I ran in a speed marathon of creativity. Although, you know, I don't I paint quickly to finish. On the contrary, I spend a lot of time in the garage. Nights. Hours of nights. Hours of the day. I try to divide my time between my work as a journalist, a father, a husband and an artist. But, yes, somehow, I have this hunger to paint. To take out of me. Because ideas come to me faster than I manage to transform them into canvases.
And then it often happens that one canvas provokes the next one. Many times one series begins to be born right during another, as is happening now with my new obsession, the Mahabharata.
It may seem like a waste fest, but I tell you, I don't feel the tank emptying at all. On the contrary.
I still can.
I still write down in my iPhone or in a paper diary images, situations and worlds that I want to paint.
I'm 47 years old, I don't have the luxury of rubbing it in like younger artists do. I don't have the luxury of shutting myself off from the world, sipping gin with my spleen, for fans to complain that I'm a douchebag. I have family, I have responsibilities, I have friends, I have love for life. I will rest in my grave. Although this is not certain either: in the other world I will be just as ambitious.

You are a very well-known journalist. When a name like yours enters the art market and sells quickly, suspicion is inevitable: do people buy the canvas or the name?

Liviu Alexa: It would be hypocritical to say that the name didn't matter. He opened the door for me, for real.
But the name is the door, not the room. I mean, no, it might make you buy it once, but it doesn't make you want to put a smoking angel in your living room and look at it every morning. It doesn't make you come back for a second cloth. I already have five buyers who have come back for a second canvas.
A year ago, everyone was waiting to see Alexa's journalist hobby and smile. After almost a year, with canvases selling for 12 or 15,000 euros each, the crooks no longer smile under their mustaches, but seethe with envy.
I don't have the real answer, time does. If in five years I'm still painting and my canvases are sold to people who have never heard of me in their life, then I've answered. Until then, I can only paint.

You don't have art school. Experts could say that your language is still under construction.

Liviu Alexa: Of course everything I do is unusual, especially since my path does not come after years of academy, workshops and methodical construction of an artistic career. I entered painting directly, brutally, in my non-conformist way, but I didn't expect for a second that the market would respond so well to my art.
I don't know if my artistic language is still being built or if it already existed in me, through the tons of readings, through the life situations experienced, through my nightmares.
I remember many of them. It's not true what they say, that you forget a bad dream in the next ten minutes. I have drawers of bad or strange dreams and I don't want to lose them.
But don't judge me superficially here either, because I don't always paint my dreams or nightmares. I can paint tenderness, memory—I can paint all of these, especially since, from my point of view, they have ceased to be separate.
I set out to paint an impossible world that, with each passing day, looks suspiciously more like our own.