Exhibitions & Press

The exhibition borrows the famous title of Aristotle's treatise on the soul. For the philosopher, the soul is a principle of life and of movement of living beings. A vital, sensory and intellectual principle. Elements that also guide the works in this exhibition where the living body inhabits the constructed body, where the animal and the baroque, nature and culture meet in bizarre symbioses.

Gheorghe Fikl proposes in this exhibition a critical and ironic look at life in the Anthropocene, at our coexistence with the natural world, at our “becoming-animal”. That is, at the process by which – as Deleuze and Guattari tell us – stability is replaced by anomaly, human inhabitation and centrality is replaced by nomadic flux and transformation.

The artist’s provocative, dreamlike scenes are rendered in a powerful, lush painting, articulated in either muted grays or sharp contrasts. Indeed, at Fikl, the exuberance and excesses of the Baroque meet Buñuel and the absurdity of surrealism, the emotion and neo-expressionist abundant materiality overlap with the organicism and shock effect of Viennese actionism. A natural, personal eclecticism, expressed in a vigorous rhetoric, with theatrical valences and subjective subtleties.

Elements of baroque and illusionist realism, of traditionalism and surrealism, refined chromaticism and wild gestualist touches, expressionism galore and small doses of kitsch – all these coalesce into large, exotic and provocative compositions.

These freely assimilated elements and influences compete to form a strong visual spectacle, dominated by red and black, in which the theatrical exists alongside a form of the sacred, the feral interlocks with the elevated, and the carnal seems to overwhelm the spiritual. And yet, miraculously, all the ingredients balance out in a sort of ambiguous harmony, charged with a certain mystery.

The latest series, Neon Heart, is and is not Fikl as we know him – and as such I find its value particularly significant in the overall context of his work. Engrossed in his usual explorations of the transient nature of the human condition, Fikl continues to investigate solitude and displacement, the instability of living at the ever-shifting intersection of historical and personal time.

Created in the isolation of the village of Socolari, during the global lockdown, the compositions of the Neon Heart series feature the ‘good room’ of Transylvanian peasant house. Neon Heart brings together again the iconic animals which define Fikl’s imagery – the peacock, the deer, and the sheep; but we also have the unfamiliar – famished wolves and fast, lean cheetahs ready to pounce.

Taking an interest in themes of the late Baroque, from which he retains the peculiarity of the subjects as well as the dramatism of the chiaroscuro or the chromatic sensuality, the artist tends to create a personal universe out of various images, merged in a hybrid way.

Eclectic and prolix, these compositions mix elements into an unusual mélange that challenges the viewer to make an effort of perception and interpretation of the image. The presence of sheep in a monumental decor, storming into the space absurdly, causes unease and fear, reminding of the eschatological symbols.

Viscontian, a young pope to a fluid expressionism, of harmonious stage decorum, Gheorghe Fikl continues to convince me for almost two decades. Fikl’s Traumland has the melancholy of a blood-drenched animist decadence – very much like a lied of Greta, the sister of Trakl.

All of this is something akin to the sophisticated-parodic-anxious brilliance of Sorrentino’s kangaroo in the Vatican Gardens.

In Fikl’s paintings two forms of bounty collide to produce a hybrid world in which the reign of glory, beauty and elegance is supreme. His compositions are almost always balanced, with a central elongated animal figure set against a symmetrical background. Indeed, his works seem plucked directly from the theatre, with a complex drama unfolding in each painting. They are like sinister operas rendered in the paint.

Fikl’s work is finally a call to assess and perhaps reject the desire for wealth and empire, despite the sublime beauty they underline.

Gheorghe Fikl places his reveries, concerning the erotic or aggressive forces, within this poetics of ambiguity, the frankly expressed explicit sensuality in the cultivation of materiality. 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.