Liviu Alexa was born in Romania on May 31, 1979. Although he was meant to become a French teacher, he became an investigative journalist instead. Now, with his first solo painting exhibition, suggestively titled We Are the Apocalypse, he reveals another, far less known and deeply surprising side of his personality.

“I did not study painting at university, but I have studied people for twenty-seven years—through case files, through sources, through documents. I have seen the evil in people in all its forms.

At some point, what I was seeing no longer fit into words. Not because I couldn’t find the right ones—I’m actually quite talented at writing—but because some things, when you articulate them too clearly, become bearable. And I didn’t want them to be bearable. That’s why I say: I paint what I cannot write. A painting doesn’t judge—it places a vision before you, the author’s vision, and leaves you alone with it.

The exhibition is called ‘We Are the Apocalypse’ in order to shatter this cozy myth that something bad, something punishing, is coming to deliver us from evil through evil and drown everything. We wait for disaster as if it were coming from outside—a comet, a war, an alien. But the apocalypse is no longer coming. It can’t come, because it is already happening. We are making it, day by day, through everything we choose to ignore, to tolerate, to consume, to post, to destroy.

My angels wear tracksuits and stare at their phones with boredom. My Madonna is an emoji, scrawled over now with a sticker, now with a ‘like.’ The sacred has not disappeared from our world, but we have stripped it of mystery. We are no longer afraid of it. We shoved it into our pocket, we put it on silent. That is why I don’t ask viewers to agree with me—many will probably become hysterical, say I’m insolent or blasphemous.

All I hope for from my art is that you won’t feel alright when you look at it. I don’t paint to decorate walls. I paint to disturb the cozy peace you mentally soak in, day after day.”