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Felix Aftene - Painting and Sculpture Exhibition                                         

The exhibition Thank You proposes a re-evaluation of the relationship between man and nature through two essential artistic media - painting and sculpture - approached in a lyrical, yet critical-reflexive key. In a contemporary artistic climate in which the dominant discourses are anchored in urgency, the spectacle of crisis and immediate socio-political commentary, the appeal to themes such as beauty, harmony or gratitude may seem peripheral, if not escapist. Yet it is precisely this thematic choice that becomes a radical gesture.

In Felix Aftene's work, nature is not represented as an external 'other', but as a natural extension of the human being. It is not landscape in the traditional sense, but a presence of nature integrated into corporeality, gesture, matter - be it pictorial pigment or sculptural mass. The artist constructs an iconography of balance, in which the human figure does not dominate but cohabits, in which form does not crush but supports.

With the title Thank You, the exhibition affirms an existential positioning: that of gratitude not just as a personal emotion, but as a form of cultural resistance. In a world of acceleration, of alienation from the environment and the self, of visual hyper consumption, Aftene proposes a return to an aesthetic of essences. Here, contentment becomes a paradigm, an ethical and artistic stance.

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Romania