Alexandru Rădvan
Wild Beach #1, 2021
acrylic and acrylic ink on canvas
41.5 x 29.5 cm
16 3/8 x 11 5/8 in
16 3/8 x 11 5/8 in
“A safe place. So familiar, yet so distant. The sum of all the sunsets, afternoons, hugs, and kisses that I have ever witnessed on the shores of my inner seas. A distilled impression of hundreds and thousands of bodies and couples I have watched, observed, spied on, admired, envied. The beauty of skin under the sun.”
Alexandru Rădvan, artist
The Wild Beach series consists of more than 30 small-scale paintings (42 x 29.7 cm) created between 2021 and 2023. As he has done in previous bodies of work, the artist explores a world of unleashed corporeality, of an eros consumed by its own excess. His characters seem driven by a deep search for freedom and human origins.
The human silhouettes—robust, archetypal, sometimes fragmented or partially concealed—are depicted in tense poses, either abandoned or in contemplation, pulsating with a primal, almost mythological energy.
The exhibition title, The Possibility of a Wild Beach, is no coincidence, referencing the literary universe of Michel Houellebecq, the French writer who dissects, with unflinching honesty, the themes of desire, loneliness, and the decadence of the contemporary world. In this series, just as Houellebecq does in his literary works, Alexandru Rădvan captures the tension between instinct and society, between the promise of limitless pleasure and the reality of a world that, rather than liberating, fragments and alienates. Both artists share a common sensitivity toward the body as a space of both anxiety and promise. Rădvan’s figures intertwine, stretch, and dissolve into landscapes that echo Houellebecq’s beaches, where desire is simultaneously exalted and doomed to failure—humanity oscillating between instinct and despair, between voluptuousness and the imminent ruin of its own illusions.
