Gheorghe Fikl belongs to a generation, which focuses on the significant density of the objects whose presence concentrates, by means of cultur- al references, ambiguous meanings, by also detaching from the romantic dramatization and the techniques of surrealism, yet by insisting on both sources. This route does not exhaust the interest in figuration, event and object, or in the spatial “metaphorization,” as sources for the pictorial exercise, for the rhetoric of the mimetic process.
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Gheorghe Fikl belongs to a generation, which focuses on the significant density of the objects whose presence concentrates, by means of cultur- al references, ambiguous meanings, by also detaching from the romantic dramatization and the techniques of surrealism, yet by insisting on both sources. This route does not exhaust the interest in figuration, event and object, or in the spatial “metaphorization,” as sources for the pictorial exercise, for the rhetoric of the mimetic process.
We might place the imagistic discourse of Gheorghe Fikl under
the generic “signs searching for a meaning,” as some “poetics of
ambiguity” or the “hallucinating pressure of the real.”
Amputated by its metaphysical dependencies, which were imposing a rigorous symbolism and managed the formal performance of the by-lanes, idealizations or the saturating displays of the sensible (visible and tangible) hypostases of reality, and also by the narcissism of a formalism, which used to be both authoritarian and rigorous in the regularity of the exercises focused on the form and composition of the space/surface, the contemporary painting searches for some utility and a core of signification to justify the destiny of “metaphorizations” and the performance of representations.
A simple exercise of visual bulimia, already seized upon by the techniques of the advertising seduction, or a pure hyper-esthetic exercise, nourished by an authentic selective investment of the cultural experience in the contemplation of beauty, discredited by the critical position of the European culture, no longer sustain the affiliation to the sensuality of the external world, especially of the material world, and the pleasure of its resorption in the pictorial metaphor.
From this viewpoint, the liberty of the contemporary art, which counts on hybridizations and the cross-breeding of mediums and aesthetic ideologies, on the cultural recurrence, stylistic ideas and solutions, authorize the artist with the whole responsibility regarding his own contribution’s investment with significations and the orientation within the labyrinth of the cultural storage, in the pressing imaginary museum, in which the analytic memory of the conscious ego combines its selection with the “mnesic” functionality, which is apparently amiable yet redoubtably implied in the decisions and options of unconsciousness.
This ally of the artist, seduced by the performance of the world and detached from the constraints of a conventional meaning, which might exert its discipline on the linguistic support, reveals – from the historical and archetypal depths – exigent senses, nostalgias, repressed or only occulted by the texture of current existential demands or by the prejudices set up by modernity. The summons emphasized by the undefined and latent sacred- ness, the disguises of a non-explicit eroticism, the lyrically non- coagulated reverie, invaded by an epic impulse miscarried into some nightmare, can delimit and nourish an artistic discourse, which is also depending on the exigent, critical and playful liberty, or the hermeneutics of a belated postmodernist program, therefore the practice of ambiguity offers so many possibilities (approached in the different moments of the images’ history) to the slide between the stylistic striking and contemporary rhetoric.
Gheorghe Fikl places his reveries, concerning the erotic or aggressive forces, within this poetics of ambiguity, the frankly ex- pressed explicit sensuality in the cultivation of materiality, in the pictorial trompe l’oeil exercises, or directly in combinations of various types of materiality (which are often oppositional), in old objects, whose participation in an aesthetic program occurs rather because of a sensual decorative impulse than to a polemical message assumed with the irony of an appeal to the ready- made. In the two types of artistic behaviour, the pictorial and the artisan-like, applied in the creation of objects, the strategies of his creation are the disguise, the paradox and the challenging context in the sumptuous ambient, composites which signal the expectation of an epic event or a narrative structure to dispel the nonsense, the rupture of situations, the mobile of juxtaposition, the oxymoron.
The disguise operates directly, like a surface strategy when, influenced by the sophisticated sensuality and referring to the nuances of decadentism, extended to the studio, whose oldness does not imply the style; the artist clothes a metallic sink into some fur, or he applies the fur, with its suggestive both delicate, tactile and necrophile texture onto a studio chair, taking advantage of the whole package of sub-significations related to the possible lucid quotation of the Duchampian approach, to a direct, mate- rial relationship with an animal universe destined to the sacrifice of consumption, to the appeals of fashion, sensible to the ideologies which moderate or display the luxury. The identification of the allusion to the sacrificial abuse, considered from the perspective of the brutality revealed by the scandal of the other beings’ material utility, beyond the symbolic certification, is supported by the series of paintings dedicated to the sheep, placed in an apparently delirious space.
There is a narrative counterpoint pointing up to the register re- garding not only the traditional shelter of the sheep but also the luxurious aspect, of celebrations, the series of Carcasses – hunks suspended in descriptively mystical spaces, in explicit Christian altars, or absorbed in a rhetorical obscurity. Disconnected or composed in disquieting and crowded ambiances, the objects, which fascinate him through the formal or material opulence, at the edge of the kitsch, search for a mobile for the sake of an opulent challenge and paradoxical affiliation simulated in the re- gime of exoticism and banality. The traditionalism of the illusion- ist strategies, subordinated to an apparent delirium, in fact of a stagecraft exercise, meets a desire to imitate/parody the mystical routes, declined in obscure initiations.
The same regime of the vague and incidental references to significations worn out by paradoxical appeals is also applied to other signs or mythical situations, such as the wing, the swan, the dog, the peacock or the car, engaged in situations which seem to feign a subterranean and unconscious pressure. Gheorghe Fikl belongs to a generation, which focuses on the significant density of the objects whose presence concentrates, by means of cultural references, ambiguous meanings, by also detaching from the romantic dramatization and the techniques of surrealism, yet by insisting on both sources. This route does not exhaust the interest in figuration, event and object, or in the spatial “metaphorization,” as sources for the pictorial exercise, for the rhetoric of the mimetic process.