The artwork Seven Sins is part of an extensive series of aesthetic explorations with a political conceptual background, brought together under the name Pursuit of Happiness.

The piece consists of seven watercolours, each representing a reinterpretation of one of the seven deadly (or capital) sins, whose names are inscribed in Latin on the armbands of the characters’ rightarms.

“I have always relied on discovering multiple layers of meaning in ordinary images, which I extract from immediate reality. This reality has always been generous with me, and I haveoften documented it through photography. Analyzing an ordinary image in the studio—a photograph I took at some point—can reveal unexpected connections or serve as a precursor to themes and ideas. I photographed the characters for Seven Sins in Bucharest, in front of the Athenaeum, on a sunny early summer day. It was a group of people participating in a photoshoot, dressed in similar, extravagant outfits, yet maintaining a note of sobriety that reminded me of the rigidity of military uniforms. 

In the studio, these photographs eventually became the basis for a metaphor whose subject of representation and exploration was the seven deadly sins. Since the theme of the capital sins is an ancient one, with millennia of depictions, formulations, and reinterpretations, I only needed to subtly identify them in the attitudes and gestures of the characters. The only elements I added were the red armbands, inscribed in Latin with the name of each sin. In this way, I transformed them into activist entities with a Nazi-Communist aura, representatives, and advocates of sin as something casual, tolerable, desirable, or even mandatory. 

Ironically, this is precisely how the concept of sin appears to me in contemporary society, which is undergoing a profound paradigm shift and a redefinition of values, rituals, and human identities.” (Roman Tolici, artist)

Roman Tolici is a contemporary artist whose photographic realist works are pierced by humour, irony, reflection and hope. His classical training in visual arts in the Republic of Moldova influenced his creation. The poetic, sometimes ambiguous paintings by Tolici capture mundane moments of life, moods and memories. He creates them in a variety of scales, sometimes repeating an image within the surface of a canvas, which reinforces its reflective, time-quality. In spite of their seductive and dreamy coating, the underlying psychological implications and straightforwardness constitute a challenge that lingers with the viewer.