Dragos Badita

Dragos views his art as a tool for establishing a contemplative connection with everyday reality, as it unfolds. Thus most of his subject matter consists of places and people he encounters, or scenes he’s inspired by. This approach tends to reveal naturally, with simplicity, ideas, themes, and a certain attitude towards life. His themes range from our relationship with nature and time, with the body, with other people, with the fluctuating nature of the self to the limits of understanding the inner worlds of others. The general mood and approach fluctuates from existential melancholy to spiritual equanimity.

Most of Dragos’s paintings are done in oil follow a traditional technique that makes use of both transparent layers of colour and opaque and textured areas. He also works in ink, a variety of drawing techniques, and lately linocut. The process that takes him to the final work is quite diverse: using a sketchbook he draws scenes that he encounters, fragments of imagination and dreams. He also makes many photos in his travels, and sometimes asks friends to sit for a painting.

In the series The room with an echo…, Dragos represented people vlogging on YouTube. He linked his interest in portraiture to themes such as the global interconnectedness brought by the Internet, with the tension between the increasing isolation of individuals and the increased possibilities of communication. His series Meditation on Perception expanded his interest in visual perception through exploring the physical, biological and mental processes that go together in generating the seen world.

A series of works in ink done in Iceland placed isolated people within a primordial landscape that is both fragile and wild. This is both means for thinking about the difficult relationship between ourselves and nature, and a place for meditative dissolution of the self.