Rather than documenting visible reality, Ștefan Curelici uses painting to investigate how space and atmosphere are felt, filtered, and remembered.

Behind Glass brings together a recent body of large-scale works that suggest stillness, memory, and disorientation all at once. Some scenes feel deserted, others quietly overwhelmed. Whether alone or among many, his subjects remain elusive—filtered through a painterly language that refracts perception more than it describes it. Color appears patinated—soft but unstable, evoking the imprint of past perception. Spaces seem to oscillate between interior and exterior, suspended between real environments and imagined atmospheres.

Curelici’s painterly language is anchored in figuration, yet his approach consistently unsettles any stable sense of realism. His compositions often rely on architectural spatial frameworks—corridors, rail lines, window frames—that are gradually disrupted through tonal shifts, veiled surfaces, and painterly erosion. Paint is applied in layers that alternate between precision and dissolution: glazes bleed, edges blur, and reflections obscure rather than clarify. Despite a structural clarity, resolution is deferred. As in certain strands of contemporary figurative painting, Curelici’s images remain suspended—charged with atmosphere yet emptied of overt narrative.

His palette often operates on a delay; colors do not depict immediate experience but seem filtered through time. Perspective and framing draw viewers into recognizably human spaces, yet never allow them to fully settle. Surface and depth remain in negotiation, resisting total legibility. This visual strategy aligns with painters who approach space emotionally—where absence, interruption, and suggestion carry as much weight as form itself.

Curelici’s commitment to slowness is not only thematic but technical. His surfaces evolve gradually, through accumulation and abrasion, leaving visible traces of decision, hesitation, and revision. It is a practice shaped less by definitive statements than by a sustained attentiveness—where ambiguity is not a retreat from meaning, but a means of inhabiting it more fully.

His 2024 exhibition activity has marked a significant moment of visibility, with Catalyst of Beginnings, Bucharest; A Corpoliteracy Approach to the Ruin, Casa Matei Gallery, Cluj, 2024; A Corpoliteracy Approach to the Ruin II, Aparte Gallery, Iași, 2024; and Urban Fragments, Pasmatex, Timișoara, 2024. These followed earlier milestones such as his exhibition at the European Parliament, Brussels, 2022, and his participation in the VIA CARPATIA Biennale, Poland, 2023, positioning him as a notable emerging voice within the contemporary art landscape of Eastern Europe.

Rather than assert a singular narrative, Behind Glass invites the viewer into spaces of measured observation—where atmosphere, pacing, and ambiguity are allowed to unfold on their own terms.