Lucian Hrisav (b. 1994, Constanța) is a Romanian interdisciplinary artist currently living and working in Bucharest. After completing his BA in Mural Painting and MA in Painting at the National University of Arts in Bucharest, he became involved in several key projects promoting emerging art, including the Center for Multimedia Visual Arts (CAV-M) and Atelier35.

Lucian develops a form of selective flexibility in the mediums he uses, supported by his ability to effectively harness their expressive potential. Through an organic mutation at the intersection of highbrow artistic culture and the urban vibe associated with street art, he begins with drawing and painting—using oil or acrylic—before extending into hybrid stylistic forms that evolve into 3D work through installations and sculptures.

This trans-dimensional effect—whether transitioning from 2D to 3D or analog to digital—remains central to Lucian’s practice. It moves beyond a mere conceptual device to become a generative mechanism in the creation of his final compositions. A key source of inspiration (and its most tangible manifestation) lies in digital image processing. Distortion, glitches, rendering errors, and signal loss become artifacts of a reality compressed through technological mediation—or, simply put, ways in which initial perception is altered to the point of losing its original character. From this starting point, using his own techniques, Lucian visually describes a contemporary existence saturated with gadgets, advertising, anxiety, impulses, desires, and failures. Whether driven by pure hedonism or oscillating between existentialism and nihilism, his artistic perspective underscores a crucial insight: the only thing connecting our subjective attempts to find meaning is life itself. His work, therefore, constructs a world seen through the filter of hyperactive positivity—a positivity born out of converted pessimism, as a natural result of embracing the sheer impulse to live.

More recently, Lucian’s work has turned toward a deliberate return to the broader history of art, revisiting classical painting genres such as portraiture, still life, and plein-air landscape. This return is far from accidental; it directly reflects his ongoing interest in how images are transmitted to us and how those transmission methods shape our understanding of representation itself. By developing a personal spray-painting technique on canvas, Lucian creates intentionally blurred, low-fidelity images—what one might call “lo-fi paintings”—where the subject appears as a distorted world, seen through an old television screen, formatted without regard to aspect ratio. In other words, his works depict a broken world desperately trying to conform to formal patterns that no longer correspond to reality. Beauty and harmony become artificial concepts with no place in basic survival—yet we remain irresistibly drawn to them. Through his chosen aesthetic and conceptual direction, Lucian confronts this natural reflex, exposing it (in a visual echo of Baudelaire’s ideal) for what it is: a toxic illusion.