Marius Bercea draws inspiration for his lively and engaging figurative paintings from what he describes as “an intensely personal archive”: family photographs, newspaper clippings, tales from his family’s history and his own memories of growing up in Romania under the Communist regime. Yet despite the gravity of the subject, the artist focuses on the happiness of simple moments, such as games, school trips and the daily rituals of childhood routine. In this series of paintings, the pathos doesn’t come from the pictorial motifs, but from the chromatic scale, like a sickly yellow bringing to mind the infected sky of the Ukraine’s Chernobyl. Bercea is paradoxically nostalgic and critical, emblematizing the position of many in eastern Europe.

Far from banishing us to the role of outsider or voyeur, Bercea’s uniquely personal and nostalgic approach elicits empathy and a sense of longing for our own pasts. The prompt for us to begin searching our own memories might be a sensitively described scene, an exchange between figures or a spontaneous gesture (it differs from painting to painting), but the consistent factor is that each depicted subject possesses a particular significance for Bercea – a trace to an actual experience - and it is the grounding of each work in an historical event that lends both weight and helps us to forge a connection.

Marius was born in 1979 and lives and works in Cluj, Romania