Ovidiu Kloska, Echoes of an Oniric Face, Acrylic on Canvas

Details

Description

Echoes of an Oniric Face
from the series “Beautiful Mind of a Dreamer”
Medium: Mixed media on canvas
Size: 85 … Read more Echoes of an Oniric Face
from the series “Beautiful Mind of a Dreamer”
Medium: Mixed media on canvas
Size: 85 x 85 cm / with case frame
Year: 2025
"Echoes of an Oniric Face" is an ontological inquiry masked as a portrait — a visual embodiment of what remains when the physiognomy dissolves and only the psychic trace, emotional density, and dream residue of a face linger. This work proposes a rupture with traditional portraiture, abandoning its reliance on identity, representation, and mimetic anchoring, in favor of a metaphysical and affective mapping of interiority.
Within the contemporary abstract portraiture paradigm, this piece inscribes itself into a lineage that includes the gestural transcendence of Francis Bacon, the spiritual abstraction of Bill Viola’s portrait films, and the neuro-emotional poetics of contemporary artists like Adrian Ghenie or Jenny Saville — while simultaneously carving a singular path that foregrounds the oniric as a method of unveiling the immaterial self.
The canvas is both mirror and membrane: a site of alchemical friction where conscious and unconscious collide. The face emerges not through outline but through energetic saturation — layers of pigment interacting like neuronal storms, chromatic currents, or dream-fossils imprinted on inner eyelids. Swaths of incandescent orange and spectral azure bleed into each other like thoughts between sleep stages; the entire surface becomes a field of cognitive weather.
What we encounter is not a face, but the echo of a face — dislocated from anatomical logic, yet deeply charged with presence. This is a portrait as vibration, where the painter becomes medium and witness to an unseen but deeply sensed identity. The dripping lines and impulsive splatters are not chaotic; they are intentional disturbances in the energetic fabric, visual stutters of unresolved memory or divine intuition. The painting breathes, pulses, disappears — like a dream trying to remember itself.
“Echoes of an Oniric Face” also challenges the phenomenology of vision. In a time when facial recognition has become digitized, weaponized, and aestheticized into a fixed commodity, this work resists — offering instead a deconstruction of visibility, a liberation of the face from surveillance, from definition, from expectation. The oniric dimension here is not decorative, but ontological: to dream the face is to reclaim its infinite potential, to let it speak in light, texture, and synesthetic vibration.
As part of the broader series “Beautiful Mind of a Dreamer”, this piece functions as a metaphysical node — a threshold through which the viewer may access not a person, but a condition of being. It suggests that perhaps the truest portraits are not those which depict, but those which resonate, disarm, and awaken. See less