About the Artist
Viorel Balas (b. 1967)
Painter · Based in Canada
Born in Bucharest, Romania, in 1967, Viorel Balas (known professionally as Victor Balas in the tech world) discovered art at the age of five. By seven, while attending primary school, he was also studying painting, sculpture, drawing, clay, and art history at Bucharest’s Școala de Muzică și Arte Plastice Nr. 5 on Lucaci Street. His secondary studies at Colegiul Tehnic de Arhitectură I.N. Socolescu deepened his fascination with form, design, and spatial composition, giving him a strong architectural foundation that still shapes his work today.
At sixteen, Viorel arrived at a creative crossroads: continue along a traditional artistic path or follow his growing passion for computers and video games. He chose both. He began working part-time in the video-game industry, and after immigrating to Canada in his late twenties, he built a successful career in software engineering and technology. Art, however, never drifted far — sculpture, drawing, and painting remained steady companions throughout his life.
Over the years, Viorel experimented with many subjects and styles—portraits, landscapes, historical scenes, imagined worlds. Eventually, he found himself returning again and again to a quieter form of expression: still life. Today, he paints almost exclusively in thick, layered acrylics applied only with knives, creating a sculptural, bas-relief surface that echoes his early training in three-dimensional form. Everyday objects — coffee cups, maps, instruments, childhood toys — emerge not as literal depictions but as dream-images, remembered through mood, colour, and texture rather than realism.
Based in Canada, Viorel continues to balance a life in technology with a committed studio practice, exploring how memory, stillness, and rhythm can transform familiar objects into luminous presences. Artist Statement ↓
Artist Statement
Still life chose me long before I understood why. Over the years I painted everything—portraits, landscapes, historical scenes — but I kept returning to objects. Quiet objects. The kind you pass every day without noticing, yet somehow they stay with you.
In still life I found something I couldn’t find anywhere else: a place where time slows down enough for meaning to surface. A cup, a compass, a toy dog, a folded gi — ordinary things that become extraordinary the moment you truly look at them.
Painting them keeps me grounded. Looking at them keeps me present. Stillness itself has a kind of life — a quiet pulse, a memory, a spirit — something that exists between the object and the one who sees it.
That is why I paint still life: because it keeps me still, and because it keeps life. My canvases are built in thick, knife-applied acrylics, like low reliefs. Objects are reduced to essential shapes and colours, then reimagined as dream-objects — remembered through feeling rather than precision.
For me, each painting is a way of “dreaming twice” — first in sleep, then again on canvas. I invite viewers to share that double dream, and to discover a deeper life inside ordinary things.