Garbage
Nine paintings developed for the Bachelor thesis at the Faculty of Painting, National University of Arts Bucharest, 2014. Mixed media on canvas. Awarded the Faculty of Painting Excellence Award, 2014.
The series starts from a simple observation: waste turns up where you least expect it — a worn-out sofa abandoned at a street corner, a dumpster by a main thoroughfare, a car suddenly repurposed as a dumping spot.
The series starts from a simple observation: waste turns up where you least expect it — a worn-out sofa abandoned at a street corner, a dumpster by a main thoroughfare, a car suddenly repurposed as a dumping spot. Documentation meant months of photographing the city, resulting in over 200 images of bins, dumpsters and makeshift dumps created spontaneously by residents in spaces never meant for that purpose. From this material I selected seven urban scenes, each becoming a standalone painting — oil on canvas, 150x93 cm, composed according to the golden ratio, with a palette restricted to greys and black-and-white tones.
Each painting captures a contrast: the expected architectural grandeur or urban order, confronted with the misplaced presence of waste. The human figure is absent from every composition, yet its trace remains everywhere — in what is chosen to be discarded, where, and how. The series does not propose a verdict on the phenomenon; it leaves the question open to the viewer, as an observation demanding a choice rather than a solution.
Visually, the series remains an academic study — drawing, form, value, composition — built on simultaneous contrast and chiaroscuro.
2014, Adrian Dica, National University of Arts Bucharest