Artist Alexandru Paul – Alexandru Paul

This series consists of generic portraits of ordinary citizens like myself, for whom safety is synonymous with normality. These are individuals who have not experienced violence directly and who live with the implicit belief that violence belongs to others, somewhere distant and abstract. The works originate as extremely small drawings, intimate and fragile in scale. As each drawing is subjected to a gradual process of physical destruction, the stages of this transformation are carefully photographed. The resulting images are then printed at a very large scale, amplifying both the material vulnerability of the original drawings and the latent tension between perceived safety and underlying fragility.

This photo series started in 2015, is a non-scientific and non-artistic research of the difference between the image “given” by the mirror and the one “given by the camera” of the people who agreed to participate.
For this I built a device in which the camera “sees” through a mirror that can then be removed.
The participants were asked to take two self-portraits: one in which they see themselves in the mirror and one in which they only see the camera.
The one on the left is the image in the mirror.

Exhibitions, Installation view,H'art Gallery, 2007

A few years ago, I used to go to the swimming pool. After swimming for an hour, when I left, I rested for a few minutes on the shore of the nearby lake.
At one point the lake was poisoned and dead fish floated gently on the surface of the water. I looked carefully at one of them and was amazed how such a beautiful thing dies, how man does not care about this beauty and is always in a hurry to do something else, killing everything in his way. But at the same time, I was amazed at the ease with which nature creates and destroys, things of a beauty and complexity that we cannot comprehend with our minds.
After a while, the lake was dried up and a bulldozer kept digging into the shore for a summer and an autumn. Where the lake had been, a thin stream of water remained and a rich reed grew around it. All kinds of birds that I had never seen before came and nested in the reeds. I bought a pair of binoculars. I was happy.
Then the bulldozer drove away leaving behind a concrete wall. The lake was flooded in place, the nests floated gently on the surface of the water.
A rat was killed on the street where I live. I watched him sink into the asphalt with the passage of time, and the cars, until he became a kind of impression, which, however, was still him, had texture, expression. It seemed that change was a continuation of life. Not of his life, but of the life that passes through all of us.
These observations linked, in a strange way, in my mind, human violence, death and beauty.
I have made a habit of driving slowly and photographing animals killed by cars on the road. But as the photos piled up, my interest in the subject waned. The inner state brought by the contemplation of the lake dissipated.