Studio Work – 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.

Between 2007 and 2017 I photographed passengers in buses and trams, drawn to a particular state that appears when people are transported — a suspension between departure and arrival, when the body continues its route while attention wanders elsewhere.Public transport once held a quiet, shared reverie. People watched the city slide past, followed reflections in the glass, rested, or remained folded into their own thoughts. Sometimes the anonymity offered by the large city allowed couples small gestures of closeness — a shoulder leaned upon, a whispered word, a kiss — brief tenderness sheltered inside the moving crowd.

During that decade I felt this interval slowly changing, as scrolling began to occupy the same empty time.

What began as observation gradually became a record of disappearance.

The individuals are not portrayed as characters but as presences temporarily detached from their surroundings — sometimes attentive, sometimes withdrawn, sometimes absorbed in each other.

Transported People, instalation view, PhototEspagna 2009. Eight double faced lightboxes, and two channel sound instalation. 5x5m, 2009.

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.