COLOR/Less

This body of work is part of an ongoing act of witnessing. For the past five years, I have followed the fragile and burning trace of the painter Murivale, in the village of Măgura—where Marian Voicu, his beloved, is buried. What unfolds is not simply a story of loss, but a slow transformation of grief into image, into gesture, into matter.

Shot on black and white film, these photographs resist clarity. They refuse to function as documents. Instead, they drift toward something more unstable—closer to memory than to evidence. The images layer, fracture, and dissolve, as if the act of seeing itself were uncertain. What emerges is not a fixed reality, but a shifting interior landscape, where presence and absence coexist.

The visual language is built through accumulation. Double exposures, textures, fragments, and interruptions become a way of thinking. The image behaves like a palimpsest—rewritten over time, never fully erased, never fully revealed. Faces merge with landscapes, bodies dissolve into branches, surfaces carry traces of decay. The human figure is no longer separate from its surroundings; it becomes inhabited by them. In this sense, the work reflects a world where mourning does not signify disappearance, but a redistribution of being.

There is a material dimension to this process. The film itself becomes a witness. Scratches, burns, light leaks, and grain are not imperfections, but inscriptions—marks of time acting directly on the image. What is captured is not only what stood before the lens, but also what happened to the image as it came into existence. The photograph carries both the outside world and its own erosion.

This approach exists somewhere between cinema and photography, between document and dream. It is guided by the belief that truth is not always visible, but can be felt through distortion. Black and white becomes a form of reduction—stripping away distraction and leaving only contrast, tension, and silence. Grain becomes breath. Blur becomes duration. The image does not describe; it evokes.

This is not a biography of Murivale. It is an attempt to inhabit the space that remains after loss. To understand how love persists when it no longer has a body. The village, the trees, the air—these are no longer just elements of a place, but carriers of presence, extensions of memory.

These images do not offer answers.
They remain as traces—of a life, of a love, of a continuous becoming.

My name is Laurențiu Manolescu. 

I am a film director and director of photography, working at the intersection of cinema and visual art, where narrative dissolves into atmosphere and image becomes a form of thinking.

For the past five years, my work has been closely intertwined with the life and practice of the painter Murivale, whose artistic universe I have been observing, documenting, and, in many ways, inhabiting. Our relationship is not built on traditional documentation, but on a shared sensibility—an understanding that art is not a representation of life, but a continuation of it.

Murivale’s work is deeply marked by the loss of his beloved, Marian Voicu, who is buried in the village of Măgura. This absence is not treated as an end, but as a force that reshapes perception, gesture, and material. His paintings carry this tension between disappearance and persistence, between intimacy and fragmentation. In response, my images do not attempt to explain his work, but to resonate with it.

What connects us is a common search: how to translate an inner state into form without reducing its complexity. His medium is painting; mine is light, time, and film. Where his gestures leave traces on canvas, mine unfold through duration, layering, and the physicality of analog film. We meet in this space of transformation—where memory becomes texture, and emotion takes on a material presence. Our collaboration exists in a fluid zone between observation and participation. I am not an external witness, but neither am I fully inside the work. The camera becomes a mediator—absorbing, distorting, and reconfiguring what unfolds. The resulting images are not portraits in the conventional sense; they are fragments of a shared process, echoes of a dialogue that continues beyond language.

This ongoing project is not about defining Murivale, nor about constructing a fixed narrative. It is about staying with the uncertainty of his world, allowing it to unfold over time, and finding a visual language that can hold its contradictions—between absence and presence, loss and continuity, silence and expression. In this sense, our artistic relationship is less a collaboration in the traditional sense, and more a convergence: two practices moving alongside each other, shaped by the same question.