On Thursday, April 2, 2026, at 6PM, Sector 1 Gallery in Bucharest will host the opening of artist Lucian Popăilă’s exhibition – “The Air and Those That Cut Through It / ”Aerul și Cele Ce-l Taie” , curated by Norbert Filep.
“Most of the time, the space occupied by the invisible activity of molecular interactions escapes optical perception, coagulating into a gentle transparency that allows the eye to absorb even the most distant horizons. Yet this transparency operates through a hidden morphology, contained within the three-dimensionality of space defined by the coordinates of a Cartesian system. The ‘volume,’ shaped by atmospheric extensions, is occupied by trajectories and natural and artificial constructs, marking commas and ellipses in the continuity of the visual void, constantly altering the diaphanous architecture of air through cuts of complex geometries.
The newly generated positions indicate inflections in the localization of objects. While the discourse of classical physics presents exact positions of objects, located at specific points in space, the Heisenbergian discourse points to a principle of ubiquity, placing this localization within a continuous probability.
For Lucian Popăilă, this placement becomes the central element of his imagery, amplifying—through the paradigm of reductionism—new mappings of occupied air.” – Norbert Filep
Lucian Popăilă (b. 1991, Baia Mare) lives and works in Cluj-Napoca, where he graduated from the Painting department of the University of Art and Design, completing his doctoral studies in 2022. The fascination with coding follows a clear trajectory in his art, beginning with an interest in fresco and culminating in the mapping of sign-titles (sometimes dictated by the time constraints of technique), which he sees as equally effective in developing a visual idiom as imagination or the photographic model.
The generation of images through medium is strategically similar to the “seriality” of certain minimalists, with the distinction that Popăilă uses it as a research tool rather than an aesthetic option. In his case, grouped expression is a method, not a style, involving progressions, permutations, rotations, inversions, and modular repetitions, all aimed at highlighting the evolution of units of visual information. The corpus of a series thus becomes a Gestalt—semantically more comprehensive than the sum of its parts—since “in mass,” things become easier to decipher and quickly acquire conceptual meaning.
Solo exhibitions include: Some Plants And a Tale, Galleria Doris Ghetta, Ortisei, Italy (2022); CHASM, Brâncovenești Palaces Cultural Center, Bucharest (2021); SICCUM, Sector 1 Gallery, Bucharest (2017).
The exhibition can be visited at Sector 1 Gallery (29 Băiculești Street, Combinatul Fondului Plastic) until May 16, 2026.
