Retinal Vertigo marks Radu Oreian’s first major solo exhibition in Romania and offers an overview of his paintings and drawings from 2016 and 2026.
Radu Oreian’s pictorial universe is populated by mythology, memory, and alchemy, unravelled through “haptic” stimuli of visual perception, which the artist exploits with great subtlety and refinement. The paintings reveal themselves as a bas-relief, in terms of the perception of volume and matter, sometimes becoming maps of real or imaginary places, where the texture of the territory, the fragrance, and the chromatic depth serve as a compass.
Inspiration from miniatures or historical frescoes, but also the calligraphy of gesture, the unique composition, or the golden ratio overlap in a visual and philosophical palimpsest, following the threads of knowledge through the modulation of matter and the corporeality of perception.
The two strands of this exhibition follow, on the one hand, those compositions carefully “embroidered” like epidermal maps, where the artist’s body becomes a kind of self-assumed pictorial flesh. The second strand takes us out of the depths of that chromatic vortex to which the exhibition title refers, projecting us into another type of vertigo, this time figurative. In the latest paintings presented here, the universe of the home or the studio seems to be superimposed with the waves of a film that envelops these rooms in the dreamlike filter of new types of spaces, but also of characters, which endlessly devour each other.
