SHOCKING PAINTINGS OF A ROMANIAN BAD BOY ARTIST — EXPLAINED
Liviu Alexa is a Romanian investigative journalist, an weird mind, and one of the most provocative new voices in contemporary painting. His canvases don’t ask for your comfort., but for your honesty.
There’s a version of this story where Liviu Alexa is simply a journalist — one of Romania’s sharpest investigative minds, the man behind Strict Secret, a newsletter so well-read it became a threat to some powerful people who prefer not to be read about. That version is accurate, but it’s also wildly incomplete, because somewhere between exposing political corruption and running one of the country’s most-subscribed independent media newsletters, Alexa picked up a brush and… what came out wasn’t therapy. It was nor hobby work, but something that stops people mid-step — and not for polite reasons.
His paintings are large, but his ideas are larger. And the questions they ask — about gender, about myth, about what we refuse to see, about who gets to be sacred — are the kind that don’t leave you when you walk out of the gallery.
“I’m not making a statement about gender. I’m playing with a theological hypothesis and placing it, cheekily, on canvas.”
PAINTING NO. 1 – Adameva
A frontal nude, rendered with the reverence of Renaissance masters — except this body carries both breasts and a penis. The figure’s gaze drifts slightly sideways, indifferent to its own nakedness, unbothered. Shame hasn’t been invented yet. That comes later, after the apple, after the split.
The hypothesis Alexa is working with is theological and almost embarrassingly logical: if God made Eve from Adam’s rib, then the original model contained everything. Adameva is that prototype — humanity before separation, the draft before the edit. The body doesn’t know it’s going to be divided into two halves that will spend eternity searching for each other. It simply stands there, complete, in the warm light of before.
What makes the painting function is precisely that calm. There’s no manifesto energy here, no provocateur smirk. The figure is painted with such classical tenderness that the shock arrives quietly — you’re three seconds in before you fully understand what you’re looking at, and by then you’re already inside the idea.
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The man who sees everything
PAINTING NO. 2 – Ochilă
A bald man in a red polo shirt — the word BLIND printed across his chest — sits at a table. Playing cards spread before him. A crushed pack of cigarettes on one side. And below the table, in his open palms: two eyeballs, raw and dislodged, which he carries but cannot put down and cannot use.
Ochilă comes from Romanian folklore — a figure who sees absolutely everything, except what’s directly in front of him. Alexa has placed him in the present day, and the biography he’s invented for him reads like a dark comedy of hyper-perception: worked for a secret service, fired for seeing too much. Advised a poker champion, but people don’t like being told the truth about their hands. Tried fortune-telling; got beaten up for the same reason.
The talent became the burden. The gift became the wound. He carries his eyes in his palms because he can’t throw them away and they no longer fit in his head.
Alexa’s commentary here is direct and devastating: genius is only appreciated after death. The exceptional are punished for what they see. The handicapped are met with false compassion and zero empathy. The strangest paradox, he says, is this: in the hearts of ordinary people there is an unimaginable cruelty; in the hearts of the exceptional there is an unimaginable need for love.
“In the hearts of ordinary people there is an unimaginable cruelty. In the hearts of the exceptional: an unimaginable need for love.”
PAINTING NO. 3 – Little Red Riding Hood that was never innocent
Red hood, red eyes, red Adidas. An axe in both hands. To her left: a steampunk wolf, mechanized, silver-plated, obedient now. Behind her: Grandmother as a skeleton in a wheelchair, kept in that state deliberately, as a reminder.
Before Charles Perrault cleaned it up in the 17th century. Before the Brothers Grimm gave it a moral. Before centuries of storytellers decided that a girl who gets eaten by a wolf is, somehow, a story about her own stupidity — there was an older, oral version where Red was clever, and escaped.
Alexa’s Red has escaped too, though the path was considerably more brutal. She’s nineteen, divorced, manipulated into webcam work by a wolf who then showed the videos to her husband to blackmail her. She picked up an axe. She killed the husband. She killed the wolf. She killed Grandmother — out of revenge, because Grandmother’s advice was worthless. The wolf now follows her as a reprogrammed machine, her guard dog, her domesticated past.
She doesn’t want love anymore. She kills every suitor in her mind before they get close. She runs at the first warm thought. And she is, Alexa says, tens of millions of women — the ones who stopped believing in love and are drowning their loneliness quietly.
The painting is a rehabilitation — Alexa’s word, and the right one. He’s done the same for Pinocchio, another character who was handed a defining flaw by someone else’s narrative. The project isn’t revision for its own sake. It’s the investigative journalist’s instinct applied to myth: who wrote this story, and what did they need you to believe?
PAINTING NO. 4 – The Annunciation on Line 3
A subway car, dark and green-lit. An android woman stands holding the overhead bar, her body half-mechanical. Inside her metallic womb: a swirling, effervescent center of red and gold light — a small galaxy, a new life. Around her, passengers with blue faces stare at nothing. Not one of them notices.
Everything sacred in Alexa’s painting, he says, comes from that womb. Everything dead already surrounds it.
The blue-faced commuters aren’t villains. They’re something quieter and more damning: a world that has simply forgotten how to look. The Annunciation is happening right here, in this subway car, at this moment — and no one sees it because no one is looking for it in a machine, in a body that doesn’t match the approved iconography of the sacred.
It’s Alexa’s most formally classical painting in emotional structure, even as it’s his most futuristic in imagery. The composition echoes every Madonna-in-a-crowd painting from the 14th century onward — the luminous center, the oblivious periphery, the sacred hidden in plain sight. Except here the Madonna has a mechanical arm and takes the subway, and the light inside her is rendered in the same impasto swirl Alexa uses for everything that matters: hot, alive, insistent.
“Everything sacred comes from that womb. Everything dead already surrounds her.”
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What connects all of these — Adameva, the blind seer in red, the revenge fairy tale, the android mother in the subway — is something Alexa doesn’t announce but enacts with every canvas: the refusal to let received wisdom go unexamined. Every figure in these paintings has been handed a story that isn’t theirs. Every painting is the moment they hand it back.
The bad boy framing? It’s not wrong, but it’s the least interesting thing about him. What’s actually shocking isn’t the imagery. It’s the intelligence behind it — the investigative journalist’s instinct applied to mythology: what is this story actually about, and who benefits from the version we’ve been told?
His new solo expo |FILCAI| will be showing fromn the 16th of April at Galeria Kulterra, Bucharest. More at alexa.space.
