NEW YORK, NY.- MARC STRAUS opened Thirty Pieces of Sun, a solo exhibition by Alexander Tinei presenting a new body of work. This is the artist’s first solo presentation at the gallery.
Working primarily through portraiture, Tinei constructs images that unfold through hesitation. His figures appear self-conscious, withdrawn, or suspended within their own perception, as if caught in the act of becoming aware of themselves. This awareness does not lead to clarity, but to a heightened sense of uncertainty. The recurring blue tonalities that trace across skin function as subtle disruptions, marking the surface while pointing inward, suggesting identity as something unstable, shaped by memory, history, and perception. This condition becomes particularly evident in Kiss (2026), where two figures merge into one another in a gesture that resists resolution: faces dissolve into painterly passages, hands press with a striking delicacy, and the boundary between bodies softens rather than disappears. What at first appears to be a simple act of affection unfolds into something more layered, an intimate recognition of the self through the presence of the other. The closeness between the figures does not obscure them, but instead reveals them, offering a quiet meditation on vulnerability and connection.
Across the exhibition, vulnerability appears as a condition: quiet, unguarded, and deeply human. A gesture of contact, a body at rest, a gaze that does not fully meet another, these moments remain suspended. The paintings sustain a particular kind of tension: one that does not escalate, but persists. In Thirty Pieces of Sun (2025), this tension turns inward. A solitary figure, read as female, though Tinei preserves a subtle ambiguity , sits enveloped within an expansive field of deep blue, accompanied by a circular form suggestive of a sun. Rather than anchoring the figure within a world, the composition isolates the figure within its own presence, as if confronted with the weight of simply being. There is a sense of fragility in this encounter, an exposure to oneself. The shared palette between the figure and the surrounding light suggests an inherent connection, as if the body and its environment were shaped by the same underlying force. What emerges is not solitude as absence, but as a deeply internal state, one that invites a quiet, almost involuntary recognition in the viewer.
Tinei’s visual language draws from both personal history and broader cultural memory, including his upbringing in Soviet Moldova, yet the work resists direct reference or illustration. Instead, fragments surface and recede. Compositions feel partially obscured, at times unfinished, allowing ambiguity to remain active within the image. What is seen is never fully stabilized; what is felt cannot be easily named.
The title, Thirty Pieces of Sun, introduces a quiet contradiction. It evokes warmth, illumination, and clarity, yet within the works, light does not resolve so much as it reveals the limits of visibility. It exposes without confirming, illuminating without securing meaning. In this sense, the title gestures toward a condition of searching: a persistence of feeling, of questioning, of remaining present without certainty.
At its core, Tinei’s practice does not ask who we are, but how we come to experience ourselves. His figures do not offer answers; they remain, insistent, vulnerable, and unresolved, holding space for a deeper encounter with the instability of being.
