Apnea (2026) Original Acrylic Painting by Stefan Popescu

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COLLECTION BLUE
BLUE V — The Thread
“The Petrification Series” · 2026
A man sits with his legs drawn beneath him, his body turned to stone — grey-white, matte, mineralized up to the shoulders. Only the hands are still alive: pink, warm, the only parts that still have blood in them. His wrists are bound with a gold thread, and the same thread rises, thin, into the palm lifted toward the light entering from the upper right. Looking at it, you can't tell whether the hand is offering the thread or whether the thread is pulling it upward — whether it's an offering or a captivity. That's all I wanted to paint. The gold here is not ornament, and it doesn't heal anything beautifully, the way kintsugi is usually used; it's what binds and what pulls, the agent, not the decoration. I kept the rest of the body in grey precisely so the thread would have nowhere to hide: in a painting full of color it would have been an accent, here it's the only decision. It belongs to a series about petrification — figures caught between the living and the mineral, captured in the instant before turning to stone, when part of them still resists. Here, the part that resists is the hands: as long as the thread is warm, the transformation isn't complete.

Materials used:

Acrylic impasto on MDF

Details:

• Acrylic painting on Panel / Board / MDF
• One of a kind artwork
• Size: 70 x 100 x 1cm (unframed) / 70 x 100cm (actual image size)
• Ready to hang
• Signed on the front
• Style: Expressive and gestural
• Subject: Nudes and erotic