Alexander Tinei

Known for his striking portraits of tattooed young subjects derived from magazines, photographs and life sittings with friends, over the past three years Tinei has become increasingly concerned with the phenomenon of instant global visibility and the exposure of people's formerly private moments on the Internet. Using his painterly style to stage and submerge these 'icons' of cyberspace within the traditional context of portraiture, Tinei has created a series of unnerving depictions situated between reality and fiction. The sense that many people today inhabit an 'other world' online in parallel to their ordinary 'real' lives is conveyed by Tinei's treatment of his figures. Their skin is almost ethereal, as if not fully human, and he plays with the idea of private and public facades through masks and disguises. In a way Tinei is playing with fiction and inventing stories that re-connect him with the inspirations of his youth.

Growing up in Moldova he spoke Russian and accepted Russian heroes while not being actually Russian himself. Looking back the artist now feels he accepted unquestionably the imposition of another culture, an alternate reality imposed on Moldova when it became part of the Soviet Union.