Gheorghe FIKL:
Personal EXHIBITION, HELIOS, 2005

Above all, Gheorghe Fikl’s works are characterized by a peculiar and exquisite tension between the austere disguise of the forms and figures and of the painting experience, on one hand, and of the unusual, quite shocking, associations among the image elements. A morphological analysis of present paintings does not offer us any “key” so that we can understand their hidden meanings. His compositions are concentred; they observe the characteristic form law and avoid any formal and useless complication or ambiguity.

It is not the structure of these paintings the place where their exquisite mystery dwells in. The morphological structure, the primary composition, otherwise thoroughly pursued, serve other purposes and, namely, the semantic expression, the metaphysical symbolism of these paintings.

The same can be said about the execution technique, about the brushwork language. Technically the painter is very artful and traditional in these, and even if such technique and language are very subtly solved, he very carefully avoids limitation to a technical and hand-made display. The unity and simplicity of the approach, even when this covers brilliant painting solving, tend to support the same symbolic and metaphorical dimension of the works. Thus, the hermeneutical decoding for understanding such works shall address to the semantic level.

The meaning of the elements and, especially, of the associations brings about the enchantment and the mystery of Gheorghe Fikl’s works.

Where do these evocations and associations come from? A simplifying approach could associate them with the figurative surrealism or with the metaphysical painting, with Rene Magritte’s or Paul Delvaux’ atmosphere. But in this particular case we also have elements of magic realism and also hyper-realistic elements and, besides, such a construction would be rather reductive.
The type of analysis that best fits these paintings is the one of amplifying hermeneutics, profound search for the semantic layers, but, especially, of the psychological grounds that have dictated the sounding of the archetype sources of the image, as it is not the artist who has chosen the figures in these works, but the figures have chosen the artist, bursting from the profundity of the subconscious. GHEORGHE FIKL’s painting has a psychological nature. Carl Gustav Jung would say that he evokes and represents archetypal figures and elements, and, as any profoundly psychological art – his art is authentic, genuine and valuable, as it evades speculative, mannerist formalizations that turn art into handicraft, especially in the postmodern contemporaneousness in which simulacrum and lack of meaning rule.

Among the ontological reasons of creation, the definitive ones are: 1) life expansion, 2) principle revelation, 3) self revelation. One of the three will dominate, function of the style, epoch and creative individuality. (...)GHEORGHE FIKL’s work is ruled by the self revelation mobile. The tension of these paintings stands for a projection of his personal inner tensions.
The symbols of his works are edifying.

The bull, the candelabrum, the dog, the peacock are both mythical elements and psychological archetypes of great profundity and polyvalence. (...)
GHEORGHE FIKL is an anachronistic artist, in the good sense of the word. The impulses and resources of his art reside in the depths of his spirit and not in the exterior background stimuli. (...) His art is pregnantly different from the plurality, otherwise extremely generous, of Timisoara’s artistic offer. It is different in terms of themes, nature and persuasion, and also in terms of its essential significance.

(Translated from the original opening speach of Conf. Univ. Dr. DAVID CAROL)