Travel Poster Artist
Artful Travels™ is Alecse’s principal body of work and the name under which his travel posters are published. Conceived as a long-term artistic project, the collection revisits the golden age of travel advertising through a contemporary lens.
Rather than reproducing the past, he reinterprets it through what could be described as an “Impressionism 2.0” — a visual language blending photography, line drawing and painting into a singular aesthetic. Each poster seeks to evoke the memory and atmosphere of a place rather than document it literally.
Alecse was born into a family where art, architecture and ambitious projects were part of everyday language. His father, an architect and painter described by Victor Vasarely as an “optical surrealist”, maintained a painting studio that left a lasting impression on him. From an early age, he was taken from museum to museum, learning to look carefully and to understand the importance of composition, light and aesthetic intention.
Travel gradually became central to his life. He spent nearly a decade in Sri Lanka, where the intensity of landscape, light and cultural identity profoundly shaped his artistic vision. He also lived for two years in New York and travelled extensively across the United States, a country whose scale and scenographic presence left a lasting impression on him. Journeys through India and across South Asia further expanded his visual vocabulary, while a long-standing fascination with Morocco continues to influence his sensitivity to colour, architecture and atmosphere.
All of his posters are released as limited editions and are originally created in large format. Each artwork is conceived at scale and is available in sizes up to 100 × 150 cm, preserving detail, texture and presence on the wall. Through Artful Travels™, he continues to build a growing collection dedicated to portraying the world, one destination at a time.
Each poster is rooted in a real place. The landscapes, cities and coastlines he depicts all exist. While he may occasionally adjust the scale of certain elements to guide the eye, he also removes distractions such as vehicles, passers-by, telephone poles or satellite dishes in order to clarify the composition. At times, he introduces subtle additions that reinforce local identity, atmosphere or a sense of period. Occasionally, discreet personal references appear within the scene, with friends or family members integrated into the composition. The intention is never to fictionalise a destination, but to distill its character.
Edward Hopper had long been one of his favourite painters, admired for his ability to portray an America that felt both real and quietly imagined — not unlike the atmosphere found in the work of Stephen King, where the familiar can take on a heightened presence. A formative influence later came from discovering a book juxtaposing photographs of the real locations Hopper painted with his own interpretations. What stood out was not resemblance, but transformation: Hopper would simplify a scene, reduce visual information and recompose it to intensify mood. By diminishing detail, the central emotion becomes clearer. This approach — distilling rather than describing — remains deeply embedded in Alecse’s way of portraying places.
His creative process involves composing and blending multiple representations of the same subject — photographic, drawn or painted — refining them into a unified vision. The final image is harmonised through controlled light, colour and soft focus. A subtle visual framing consistently structures the composition.
Each poster follows a distinctive visual architecture that is consistent across the collection: an off-white outer margin, a drawn linear border often rendered in muted gold tones, a second off-white breathing space, and finally the destination image itself. This layered framing creates balance and coherence while allowing the image to breathe. Within this structure, several recurring elements define his visual language, including a dual-title layout, the use of soft focus and atmospheric blur to guide attention, and a delicate halftone finish inspired by traditional printing techniques. The larger the format, the more perceptible this texture becomes, reinforcing both the vintage character and the recognisable identity of the work.
Through his signature collection, Artful Travels™, Alecse aims to portray the world, one destination at a time — with the long-term ambition of becoming the first artist to reinterpret every country through the language of the travel poster.
Over the years, his work has been featured in French décor and lifestyle magazines and included in publications by Assouline. One of his posters was selected to illustrate an official exhibition book published by the MUCEM (National Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilisations, Marseille).
His artworks have appeared on the cover of contemporary fiction, in architectural showrooms, four-star hotels and restaurants across the United Kingdom, France, Spain, the United States and Canada. His posters have also been seen on film sets, reinforcing their presence within contemporary visual culture.