On August 18, 2026, the Anton Badea Ethnographic Museum in Reghin, my hometown, hosted Leonid Popescu’s exhibition “Bessarabian Nostalgia”. The public warmly received the exhibition, and prominent local figures attended, with coverage from Ardealul TV.
I first met Leonid Popescu at his exhibition in the Târgu Mureș Citadel and had the pleasure of working with him on art workshops we organised for children in the exhibition space. Beyond his work, I was struck by the quiet reserve and modesty of an artist with such a rich resume.
Leonid Popescu was born on March 22, 1953, in Sărătenii Vechi, Telenești district, in an environment where family memory, work, and traditional visual culture played an important role. His mother, Alexandra, a recognised folk craftswoman in the Republic of Moldova, was a particularly significant figure. The critic Eleonora Sâtnic observes that the world of carpets, woven fabrics and colours in his childhood home gave him some of his earliest experiences of beauty.
He began his artistic education in adolescence with drawing studies in Orhei. From 1969 to 1973, he studied painting at the Alexandru Plămădeală Republican College of Fine Arts in Chișinău, then attended the Kharkiv Institute of Industrial Art from 1974 to 1980, specialising in design and industrial graphics. This path helps explain two qualities that remained constants in his work: a sure command of structure and a careful approach to organising the pictorial surface.
In the early 1980s, he worked in museum exhibition design. In 1982, he began an extensive period of church restoration and painting, particularly in historic Maramureș and in Romanian communities in present-day Ukraine, sites that I have had the opportunity to visit. Years of scaffolding work followed in churches and sacred spaces, alongside numerous projects in the Republic of Moldova. Among the major achievements of his mature career was the painting of the interior of the Nativity Metropolitan Cathedral in Chișinău, undertaken with a team of artists. He served as lead artist and organiser, devising the cathedral’s iconographic programme and religious compositions, which received the Synod’s and the Metropolitan’s blessing. For this mural project, executed in the fresco (al secco) technique, Patriarch Alexy awarded him the Order of Andrei Rublev of Moscow and All Russia. His experience in monumental art is closely connected to his easel painting, book graphics, and illustrations for the novels he writes and illustrates, as a multifaceted artist. I believe it shows in both the quiet gravity of many of his compositions and his respect for the human figure, space, and light.
Alongside his work in the visual arts, the painter and writer Leonid Popescu is a pioneering figure in the Republic of Moldova, combining writing, drawing and painting within the academic realist tradition. The Writers’ Union of Moldova records his publishing debut in 1996 with the monograph “Sărătenii mei dragi” (“My Beloved Sărăteni”). This was followed by volumes of journalism and commentary, and by the novel “La porțile mării” (“At the Gates of the Sea”), published in 2001 and awarded a prize by the Writers’ Union of the Republic of Moldova. Further works of prose, drama, and writing on art followed, including “Despre artă și artiști” (“On Art and Artists”), “Tragedie pozitivă” (“Positive Tragedy”) and “Deportări din valea Răutului” (“Deportations from the Răut Valley”). This dual vocation as painter and writer does not seem accidental. In both forms of expression, the theme of memory recurs.
Public recognition has reflected the breadth of his career. In 2000, a solo exhibition of forty of his graphic works was held at the Romanian Parliament. He received the title of “Master of Arts” in 2001, was awarded the “Order of Honour” in 2013, and was named a “People’s Artist” of the Republic of Moldova in 2016. In recent years, he has continued to exhibit in the Republic of Moldova and Romania. In 2023, he exhibited at Ștefan cel Mare University in Suceava. In 2025, his exhibitions included “Portraits in the Academic Style” at the National Museum of Ethnography and Natural History in Chișinău. In July 2026, “Bessarabian Nostalgia” was presented at the Cupola in the Târgu Mureș Medieval Citadel. The exhibition then travelled to Reghin, where I had the honour of initiating discussions with Roxana Man about hosting it in collaboration.
I would now like to say a few words about how I personally perceive the artist’s painting. Leonid Popescu defines his work in terms of realism, evident in his fidelity to faces, places, architecture and detail. Yet in certain landscapes, I also sense an affinity with Impressionism, particularly in his interest in light at a specific time of day, air, reflections, and atmosphere. I would not describe him as an Impressionist painter in the strict sense. It seems more appropriate to speak of realism with Impressionist touches.
The critic Eleonora Sâtnic describes this quality convincingly: in Leonid Popescu’s painting, forms, rhythms, colours, and light come together in quiet harmony, and the light is often soft and diffuse, as though filtered through the sky. This is precisely where I recognise something I once wrote in his visitors’ book: some of his landscapes give me the feeling of a Sunday afternoon. I do not mean Sunday only in its religious sense, but that rare state of tranquillity when, for a few moments, the world seems settled and at peace with itself. I sense the same calm in his portraits, where the expression is neither showy nor theatrical, but thoughtful and attentive, sometimes conveying a kind of goodness and quiet wisdom.
If I were to look for an affinity within Romanian painting, I would turn first to Nicolae Grigorescu. I do not mean an influence I could establish through documentary evidence, but a kinship of sensibility: closeness to the landscape, an interest in light, the dignity of rural life, and the ability to translate direct observation into a state of feeling. Grigorescu is known for painting outdoors, and this living relationship with nature offers one way of approaching some of Popescu’s landscapes.
According to the artist, during his student years in the Soviet period, he was always captivated by Romanian painters. He obtained books on their art in major cities such as Chernivtsi, Odesa, Kyiv, Moscow and Leningrad, because, as he recalls, those were the conditions in the Republic of Moldova at the time: Romanian art literature was neither sold nor permitted.
Much could be written about the painter and writer Leonid Popescu: monographs, biographies, books. Yet his own aspirations are rooted in his parents’ and grandparents’ stories, through which he first learned about their country, Greater Romania. His artistic journey began in the Maramureș region and its historic lands beyond the Tisza, in Northern Bukovina around Chernivtsi, the Land of Beech Trees, and the Dorna region. Crossing the Prislop Pass high in the Carpathians, he travelled into Upper Moldavia toward Piatra Neamț, Neamț Monastery, and Putna. Along the way, fellow painters and writers accompanied him, including the writers and humourists Constantin Bolboacă, Constantin Moldovan and Constantin Befu; Andrei Breabăn, a writer whose work centres on Stephen the Great; and the patriotic historian Ion Ițco. More recently, he has presented his paintings at exhibition openings in museums across Transylvania: in Sighișoara, at the Medieval Citadel in Târgu Mureș, at the Ethnographic Museum in Reghin, the Art Museum in Bistrița and the Museum in Dej. His dream is to continue on to Banat, Dobrogea and Oltenia.
For twenty years, Leonid Popescu contributed to “Literatura și Arta” (“Literature and Art”), the periodical in the Republic of Moldova edited by Nicolae Dabija, alongside the academicians Nicolae Dabija, Grigore Vieru, Mihai Cimpoi, Ion Hadârcă and Iulian Filip. Through his book launches and exhibition openings, he strives to bring together fellow Romanians from everywhere, across borders, in support of reuniting Moldovan Bessarabia with the mother country, with the vision of restoring Greater Romania and moving a step closer to the European Union.
In closing, I would return to two phrases I wrote down after our meeting in Târgu Mureș: “a Sunday afternoon” and “brothers by language”. For me, the second is a cultural and human expression rather than a political one. It means that, beyond borders, we can recognise one another through language, memory, images and sensibility. Art has this very tangible ability to turn distance into an encounter.
I invite you to view the works in this travelling exhibition not only as images of places and faces, but as forms of memory. Look at the light, the stillness, the texture of colour, and that balance between faithfulness to reality and the emotion reality leaves within us; between the literary word and the drawn line. In the work of the multifaceted artist Leonid Popescu, these become a leitmotif of renewed re-twinning and the reunification of Greater Romania.
Andreea-Iulia Someşan, 2026
Visual artist from Reghin and facilitator in organising these travelling exhibitions across Romania, which will continue under the title “Bessarabian Nostalgia”.
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