NADA Miami 2022

Cristian Avram’s ‘classicist’ oil paintings draw together form, tone, colour and light, in aesthetic analyses of everyday environments. Taking photographs of daily life, Avram refines these images through paint, removing superfluous detail to distil the atmosphere sensed within each one; through this process, outer and inner dimensions collide upon the canvas, creating a sense of the future, incomplete pasts, immemorial time, and the concealed places of the soul. His subjects are often rooted in his Transylvanian childhood, in the countryside near Alba Iulia, Romania, where rural life, post-Soviet imagery and a nascent capitalism conflict and coexist.

In ‘Sloppy rectangles’, Avram presents a gloomy exterior viewed through a window frame. Here, the dualities that characterise Avram’s work - interior and exterior, presence and absence, day and night - are, at once, blurred and strongly reaffirmed. With tight compositional control, he presents an image within an image and a frame within a frame, the darkness viewed from the light. Through the interplay of tone, shadow, opacity and transparency, ‘Sloppy rectangles’ evokes an alternative aesthetic dimension, suspended between everyday naturalism and a liminal, atemporal state.