Romanian-born Marius Lehene recently moved to Colorado to serve on the faculty of Colorado State University in Ft. Collins. Receiving bachelors degrees in both Fine Art and Economics in Romania, Marius earned his M.F.A. at SMU in Dallas, Marius has received numerous awards for his artistic and academic achievement and has been a featured lecturer in the subjects of art, art-economics and philosophy in the U.S., Romania and Hungary. He has exhibited extensively in Romania and Texas, but we are delighted to present his first large-scale show in Denver.

Marius's dramatic, generally large-scale works echo a tradition of European masters and contempory abstraction. Layered both literally and conceptually, the work fuses lush, expressive painting technique, deep color, and symbolic narrative. Marius's new work being unveiled at Studio Aiello is part of a larger group of works centered thematically around the myth of Charon. Marius moves between image and the objective quality of the surface, exploring the inherent tension between the two. He employs antithetically transitive gestures to reflect this semantic gap. The contained conflict between the representational functions of the mark and its immanent richness as material is something he is always pursuing. In this work, dried aquatic life forms serve as his motif. Their isolation allows him to meditate about the "part", the "whole", and the elusive "in-between."