Sergiu Toma

'Painting consists of more than the motive’, says Sergiu Toma, born 1987 in Baia Mare, Romania. This might sound surprising, since he started out his career with hyper realistic portraits. However, when he had reached perfection in his skills, he started to be interested in painting as a medium and its expressive potential.

Inspired by the renaissance, baroque composition and the theatre which discovered light as a key element of mise-en-scene, his paintings gain a playful momentum. His immediate surrounding started to influence his work and clearly show the context in which the artist was born and raised in, his childhood and family. The scenes, often very large formats are charged with mysticism and magic. The motives are a mixture of everyday life and dream and draw the viewer in. His interiors are often filled with familiar objects of symbolic meanings and abstract moments of light, hinting at something ineffable. The closed and open spaces in his works appear to be gloomy passages of transition: roads, rooms with open doors to other rooms, wide open squares. It’s the spaces and light situations that make those paintings contemporary. His subjects stem from his personal life, his memories, his childhood. He reanimates those memories that appear on canvas after having been filtered by time itself. His attention to detail pairs up with moments where things appear out of focus, so that objects get blurry and scenes seem to be hidden behind a veil, showing the fleeting character of every captured moment.

Sergiu Toma (born 1987, Baia-Mare, Romania) lives and works in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. He studied at the University of Art and Design Cluj-Napoca, where he obtained a Master's degree in painting.  In the past decade, Sergiu Toma had several solo exhibitions at Galerie Fravi, Domat, Ems, Switzerland; Galleria Doris Ghetta, Ortisei, Italy; Galleria Monica De Cardenas, Milano, Italy; Metis NL Gallery, Amsterdam; Netherlands; Gallery Mie Lefever, Destelbergen, Belgium and Slag Gallery, New York, USA. In 2019 Sergiu Toma was part of the group exhibition Madness at Galerie im Park Bremen, Museum for Contemporary Art and Culture, Bremen, Germany. In 2017, he participated in the group exhibition The Wanderers, Contemporary Painting from Cluj curated by Maria Rus Bojan at Richard Taittinger Gallery, New York.