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 painting 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, a specialized music and fine arts school on Lucaci Street. His secondary studies at Colegiul Tehnic de Arhitectură I.N. Socolescu, one of Bucharest’s leading architecture-focused institutions, 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 constant 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, folded forms — emerge not as literal depictions but as symbolic structures. Some are remembered through mood, colour, and texture; others are isolated, reduced, and placed in quiet confrontation, exploring themes of fragility, time, and system rather than realism alone.
Based in Canada, Viorel continues to balance a life in technology with a committed studio practice, exploring how memory, stillness, and structure can transform familiar objects into charged forms. Artist Statement ↓
Artist Statement
Still life chose me long before I understood why. Over the years I painted everything — portraits, landscapes, historical scenes — yet I kept returning to objects. Quiet objects. The kind you pass every day without noticing, yet somehow they remain.
In still life I found something I couldn’t find elsewhere: a space where time slows enough for meaning to surface. A cup, a compass, a toy dog, a folded gi — ordinary forms that become charged the moment you truly look at them.
Painting them keeps me grounded. Looking at them keeps me present. Stillness itself carries a quiet pulse — something that exists between the object and the one who sees it.
That is why I paint still life: because it steadies me, and because it preserves life. My canvases are built in thick, knife-applied acrylics, like low reliefs. Objects are reduced to essential structures and colours, sometimes remembered through feeling, sometimes pared back toward precision.
In recent work, I have become increasingly interested in the quiet authority embedded in objects — tools that measure, clocks that structure time, hands that intervene. These paintings ask not only what we remember, but how we evaluate, preserve, and impose order on what is fragile.
For me, each painting is a way of “dreaming twice” — first in sleep, then again on canvas. I invite viewers to enter that second space, where memory, structure, and stillness meet.