Painting · Drawing
Aurel
Asanache
Asanache works the human figure through line and point — a grammar of duality, and of the body in the act of becoming. Trained at the «George Enescu» National University of Arts in Iași, his is a precise hand, not a mystical one: the figure caught in the moment before it decides what it is.
Artist Profile
Aurel Asanache is the artist with whom ALTAR began. Before there was a gallery, there were his paintings — and the conviction that they deserved a space built around their seriousness.
His grammar is built from line and point: the human figure constructed mark by mark, until the body seems to arrive on the canvas rather than be placed there. Nothing decorative — figures caught in a decisive moment, a gesture, a silence.
The work lives on a duality. Arhanghel, Ascensiune, Ecce Homo — titles that carry the weight of a tradition without submitting to it. These are not devotional images but investigations into what a figure still holds: fear, longing, transformation — the body under pressure, in the act of becoming.
Technically, Asanache works primarily in oil, with occasional gold leaf applied at stages that are deliberately hard to locate — so that the gold appears to come from within the surface rather than from above it. The canvases are large enough to require the body of the viewer, not just their eyes.
Asanache is the artist with whom ALTAR begins. As a pre-launch gallery, we are building his exhibition history deliberately and in public — starting with a single presentation in Iași, rather than a borrowed one elsewhere.
Selected Works · 2021–2024
Works
A figure mid-descent, neither falling nor landing. The wings are implied by the light rather than painted — a formal decision that took eighteen months to make.
The figure is presented, not condemned. A re-reading of the traditional subject that removes the crowd and the verdict, leaving only the act of looking.
Movement rendered as weight rather than speed. The figure rises not by lightness but by will — a distinction the painting spends its entire surface making.
One of the earliest works in which Asanache introduced gold leaf — here placed at the periphery of the figure, as if illuminating from outside what cannot be seen from within.
A smaller format than Asanache typically uses, which makes the intimacy of this figure unexpected. The work operates at the scale of a conversation rather than an announcement.
The largest canvas from the early period. A departure from oil that the artist has not repeated — the speed of acrylic produced something he describes as "too honest."
A figure caught in the act of recomposing itself — not born, not dying, but in the intermediate state that makes both possible. The title is exact.
The only diptych in the artist's catalogue to date. The two panels resist resolution — each complete, neither sufficient. A work conceived as a pair.
Inaugural · Iași, Romania
The First Offering
Aurel Asanache's work anchors The First Offering — ALTAR's first real act. Not a survey or a tour, but a single encounter: one body of work, presented once, to those who are present.
Iași, Romania · date to be announced
The First Offering →Presentation film
Available Works · ALTAR Gallery
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Aurel Asanache
Selected works available. Private viewings arranged on request.
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