Le paintre 1990

This is Nicolae Maniu’s painting, "Le peintre," and like the title suggests, it’s about painting itself. Look how Maniu uses a traditional, muted palette for the figure and then bam! He throws this hyper-real, almost psychedelic gold foil into the mix. It’s like he’s playing with art history, then kicking it into another dimension. You can almost feel the texture of the wood frame. Then your eyes drop to that crinkled gold sheet, reflecting light like a disco ball in a dark room. It’s so tactile, so real, you almost want to reach out and touch it, but then you remember it's a painting. Notice the way the folds in the foil create these sharp, angular shapes. It's like a conversation between abstraction and representation. I'm reminded of David Hockney, another artist who loved to play with the surface of things. Ultimately, painting is a mirror reflecting back at us our own desires, our own ways of seeing. There's no right or wrong way to look, just different ways of experiencing the world.