(b Thessaloniki, 7 Sept 1924). Romanian painter of Greek birth. He studied painting in Bucharest in 1945–50 at the Institute of Fine Art ‘N. Grigorescu’ under Jean Al Steriadi, Camil Ressu and Alexandru Ciucurencu, and also at the ‘Guguianu’ Academy of Art. He made his début at the Official Salon in Bucharest in 1947, and in the 1950s and early 1960s he resisted the rigid tenets of Socialist Realism in order to develop a personal style influenced by purely aesthetic considerations. His early work was figurative and depicted in a simplified way industrial landscapes and people resting or working (e.g. Woman Worker, 1961; Bucharest, N. Mus. A.). Gradually he pared down detail and abandoned the illusion of depth, so that forms were reduced to the emblematical, and colour contrasts were made more extreme, as in Still-life with Plants (1972; see Grigorescu, fig. 24). As his work became more minimal, there was an ambiguous interplay between figuration and abstraction, especially in his marine paintings and his still-lifes. Pacea participated in the Biennales in Venice (1964) and São Paulo (1969), and also in a group exhibition at the Richard Demarco Gallery, Edinburgh (1971), as well as in official and unofficial exhibitions in Romania. He also created cartoons for tapestries and designs for murals in both fresco and mosaic.