Andrei Acris

SLAG&RX is pleased to present Fresh Young Paintings for Sale, Andrei Acris’ debut exhibition with the gallery. Bringing together a new body of paintings, the exhibition explores the unstable terrain between figuration and abstraction, where bodies, architectures, and gestures emerge through accumulation, dissolution, and continual transformation.

Acris approaches painting not as a vehicle for narrative, but as a material process through which images slowly precipitate into visibility. His figures are rarely fixed or fully resolved; instead, they hover in states of becoming, stretched, fractured, doubled, or partially absorbed into surrounding fields of color. Faces appear only to dissolve into line, while bodies seem tethered to schematic structures that function simultaneously as interiors, landscapes, and psychological extensions of the self. Throughout the exhibition, the image remains suspended between construction and collapse.

Working primarily in oil on linen, Acris builds his paintings through layers of chromatic tension, gesture, and revision. Saturated reds, acidic yellows, deep blues, and dissonant greens press against one another, generating pictorial environments that feel emotionally charged rather than descriptive. Color in these works does not simply define form; it exerts pressure upon it. Figures appear compressed by their surroundings or pulled outward into instability, blurring distinctions between body and space, subject and atmosphere. Despite their abstraction, Acris’ paintings retain an intense physical and psychological presence. Elongated limbs simplified architectural motifs, and loosely constructed interiors evoke states of displacement, vulnerability, and emotional dislocation without ever resolving into fixed narratives. The works resist illustration and instead operate through sensation: tension, compression, fragmentation, and release. What emerges is less a depiction of a person than the trace of an internal condition. The apparent immediacy of Acris’ mark-making conceals a highly controlled painterly structure. Lines alternately stabilize and destabilize the image, functioning both as scaffolding and rupture. Paint accumulates into dense material passages before thinning into translucent stains or collapsing into raw gesture. Across the exhibition, figures repeatedly drift between presence and disappearance, as though the paintings themselves are testing how much form an image can sustain before dissolving entirely.

While his practice engages with traditions of postwar figuration, gestural abstraction, and expressionist painting, Acris ultimately resists allegiance to any singular historical lineage. His work instead reflects a sustained commitment to painting as a site of transformation — a medium through which instability, memory, displacement, and perception remain materially active. The paintings do not present fixed identities or narratives; they stage the continual emergence of form itself.
 

About the Artist

Andrei Acris is a Romanian-born painter based in the United States. Born in Cluj-Napoca in 1983, he relocated to Canada at the age of nine before permanently settling in the United States at fourteen, an experience of geographic and cultural displacement that continues to inform the fluid and unstable character of his work.

Acris began drawing in charcoal during adolescence before committing fully to painting at an early age. His practice has remained deeply focused on the internal logic of painting itself: gesture, materiality, surface, and the unstable relationship between abstraction and representation. Through a sustained engagement with process, he has developed a distinct visual language in which figures emerge through accumulation, erosion, and continual reconfiguration.

His work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe, including presentations at Jadite Galleries, New York; Gora Gallery, Montreal; Grace Li Wang Gallery, Raleigh; and Sandwich Gallery at Villa Catena, Bucharest, among others.

Fresh Young Paintings for Sale marks Acris’ debut exhibition with SLAG&RX New York.