When the purple bull comes to the palace

It's Gheorghe Fikl's second time in Bucharest after the "Bull and Chandeliers" exposition held at the Galeria Posibila this February. The new project is entitled "XL" and it's also held at the Galeria Posibila - this time in collaboration with The Carturesti Library - and it's open to the public until the 20th of December.
In the tea-room of the Carturesti Library, 5 immense paintings dominate the room and together with the sophisticated flavors of the tea and the soft music they create a poetic atmosphere. What else could I have done on that Saturday morning except sit at a table, drink some ginger tea and stare at the walls. I'd like to take this opportunity to state that, contrary to what down-to-earth people claim, staring at the walls can be a complex, revealing experience, under no circumstance useless, that implies a greater effort that one would imagine. It depends on the walls. That walls I was starring at were decorated with 5 paintings that sent you to a world of strange associations, of "concrete irrationality" as Dali would see it.
Those paintings were called: " Purple Bull", "Black Bull", "The Woman In Lace", "The Winged Dog" and "XXL Bull" and belonged to the painter Gheorghe Fikl.

In his second surrealist manifest, Andre Breton speaks of a point where contraries meet and reconcile. Fikl's paintings are the overlapping of different worlds, a collage of contrasts that reconcile, where the irrational ensemble is drawn from that superposing of things belonging to different regimes.
They show reality through dreams creating an apparent correspondence, whose strange vibe comes from challenging reality and pushing it towards its limits. The contrast between sumptuous settings and the vitality of the animal world creates an intermediate space where oppositions annul each other.

That feeling of grandeur, luxury, esthetic domination and imposing elegance is given both by the size of the paintings as well as they apparent classicism, through dark, powerful tones and the representation of certain being (bulls, dogs, women) that in this type of setting become surreal. The tension generated by the subjective association of a purple bull with a palace or of a dog with one wing flying before it creates an unknown dimension of what we perceive as real.
What's interesting is the method used by Fikl to create these paintings. The sketches are initially generated on the computer. It's on the computer that associations, ideas, the forms later transposed in the painting are born. Not finding a catalog for this exposition or a brochure I read from an elegant purple notebook some of the public's opinions.
I hope they will forgive my indiscretion as I will end this article with some of the opinions expressed by the public: "If it was meant to baffle us, congratulations - it was successful! If it was meant to be an expression of force, congratulations - it was again successful!" "Settings which remind us of the <<Patriarchs Autumn>>, where animals conquer the palace", said another visitor.

Cristina FOARFA

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