Liviu Alexa's solo debut - the Winter Olympics of amputated octopuses or the Last Supper during lockdown

by Mela Dasein

"We are the Apocalypse" represents the first solo exhibition of journalist Liviu Alexa, a surprising incursion of a journalist, analyst, author into neo-expressionist painting. The exhibition at the Cluj-Napoca Art Museum reveals another face of a man known to the public for uncomfortable journalistic subjects, for his political stance and the "Strict Secret" substack.

The exhibition, curated by Dan Breaz and organized with the support of the Cluj County Council, brings together a significant number of works that explore personal apocalyptic themes in the original key through a brutal, chromatically violent figurative painting, with compositional accents that can be easily classified as "dare". The opening took place on February 12, in the presence of university professor Dr. Lucian Nastasă-Kovács, the manager of the museum and of the univ. dr. Ioan Sbârciu.

“No, they don’t do it for the sake of it, they do it for real!”

The title of the exhibition, "We are the Apocalypse", is not an abstract statement, but an effective reading key for the entire series. Alexa seems to be laying on canvas an inner apocalypse, the one that everyone carries within themselves and does not have the courage to reveal. However, the author breaks barriers, transforming personal anxieties into collective themes and into uncomfortable visual narratives.

His works operate on the border between figurative and fantastic, between frust realism and a liberating fantasy universe. Liviu Alexa's language does not seek to please. His works shout, point the finger, accuse, assume the deformity and the grotesque as a form of honesty.

The exhibited canvases bear equally evocative and provocative titles: "Nightmare with the king who lost his cat (Nightmare of the King Who Lost His Cat)", "New show in town: LIVE angelification", "Judas is busy today", "Madonna dell"Emoji, protective dei Polpi (Saint of Emoji, protector of octopuses)".

Each work builds its own narrative universe, but subject to the unifying idea of judgment without management. Liviu Alexa's universe is populated by hybrid and willfully alienated characters - fallen kings, domesticated monsters, angels adapted to the environment, online apostles. The colors are bold, sometimes aggressive; the black and brown that occupy large spaces are "broken" by shades of incandescent red, poisoned yellow, violent purple, all applied bravely, almost contemptuously, in a manner that betrays expressive urgency rather than a concern for neat and decorative finishing.

“You are serving, but you are not a servant”

Liviu Alexa is an atypical figure in the Romanian media landscape. And he loves to feed the public perception of a "bad boy". But his literary art (and now also the visual one) also shows us something else. Alexa cultivates a fascination for literature, traveling in yellow sneakers or through the depths of the mind, philosophy, poetry and pop culture. His substack alternates between political analyses, essays on film and literature, personal reflections on fatherhood, nostalgia and life. And he somehow manages to alternate texts about prostitutes and kissing in the ass with the terrible nostalgias of Cinema Paradiso.

It is precisely this whirlwind of ideas and feelings that is reflected in his painting. Alexa does not paint out of the ornamental desire to be labeled an "artist", but probably out of the need to exorcise inner demons. visuals and to give shape to states that words cannot fully encompass. We will have the opportunity to wonder at the next exhibitions, which will certainly not be long in coming.

Liviu Alexa declares in writing that he refuses to be liked, a kind of Titanic Waltz on simese. He does not succeed completely, because the grotesque he proposes is enriched with fine humor and an understanding attitude towards the sins of modernity. The author's ecstatic reporting on Roberto Benini's masterpiece, La Vita e Bella, shows us that beyond the angular words there is a sensitive, even romantic, artist.