“ A Banquet with Existence”
At Invitro cells, within the Atelierele Malmaison complex in Bucharest, George Semeniuc presents Recent Paintings (maybe The “Dinner”), on view from May 21 to August8, 2025. This solo exhibition unfolds as a visual essay on existence, rooted in the emotional and symbolic dimensions of human connection. Through carefully staged compositions, Semeniuc invites viewers to encounter fragments of themselves—mirrored, refracted, and reimagined through paint.
The works create a subtle dialogue between material and perception: the burgundy velvet of drapery, the fabric of the floor, dark tones, and metallic reflections set against stark white walls form a sensorial interplay of textures and atmospheres. These formal choices echo the variability of light and the subjective nature of sight. Semeniuc navigates human essence through the lens of filiation and shared memory, crafting a space where personal mythology meets collective imagination. The Renaissance emerges here not as a historical citation, but as a metaphor for a spiritual renewal—a kind of inner spring.
Self-portraiture and symbolic still lifes with shells act as central motifs, signaling a synthesis of introspection and sensory awareness. Shells, long-standing emblems of fertility, seduction, and rebirth, are reframed as motifs within a pop-informed culinary iconography, where food becomes both medium and message. Semeniuc draws attention to the way consumer culture infiltrates daily life, particularly through the aesthetics of food. Common items such as sardines—stripped of context and elevated through seductive marketing—become vehicles for reflection on value, desire, and identity. Plating itself emerges as a cultural barometer, signifying status, style, and a new visual language shaped by gesture and performance.
Philosophical undercurrents run throughout the exhibition, particularly the influence of Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose inquiries into language and meaning resonate with Semeniuc’s approach. The works acknowledge the limits of knowledge while embracing painting as a way of thinking, feeling, and remembering. Emotional memory, both personal and communal, is a structuring force within the exhibition. Many of the figures originate from the artist’s close sanguine lineage, with their features reconstructed from archival photographs and rendered with compositional echoes of artists such as Pietro Perugino and Giovanni Bellini.
The portraits often juxtapose human subjects with incongruous elements: a sardine tin, a plate of garfish, a faintly visible Byzantine icon. These combinations point toward an inner world shaped by memory, technology, and absence—suggesting landscapes where Google Maps and private recollection overlap. Semeniuc’s characters seem caught in a perpetual search for new forms of socio-spiritual life, navigating between nostalgia and transformation.
One key painting, “Portrait of a Young Man”, offers an emblematic image of the present moment: a contemporary figure cast in the role of the chameleon. The metaphor speaks to a broader tendency in Semeniuc’s work—one that embraces adaptability, emotional subtlety, and a rejection of outdated aesthetic constraints. Daily life, in this light, becomes both ritual and experiment, a space where taste, memory, and gesture coalesce. Nostalgia is redefined not as regression, but as raw material for self-creation. Food, too, becomes a contemplative object and a cosmopolitan marker of identity.
Across the exhibition, portraits are shown in dialogue with pasta, shrimp, and shellfish—elements recontextualized and charged with new meaning. Semeniuc suggests that our behaviors and rituals, even the most mundane, are shaped by an anthropology of taste. In this sense, his subjects transcend autobiography. They speak to a larger narrative: the rewriting of contemporary human history through memory, intimacy, and the shared blood that connects us.
With Recent Paintings (maybe The “Dinner”), George Semeniuc invites viewers to a banquet of the self. As the artist writes:
“In every portrait, our being contemplates our being. I assume the chameleonic role, defragmenting my ego, my nature, my creative identity. Indulge yourselves.”
The text was written by Alexandru Davidian and has already been published in the Romanian cultural magazine,“Observator Cultural”.
George Semeniuc was born in 1994 in Baia Mare, Romania. He is currently pursuing doctoral research at the Universityof Art and Design, Cluj-Napoca. His work has previously been exhibited at SABOT Gallery in Cluj.
