Romfilatelia offers to avid collectors and the general public an issue of postage stamps with the subject of painting, composed of 3 stamps, a perforated souvenir sheet and a First Day Cover. The images reproduce works belonging to a great Romanian artist, Ion Alin Gheorghiu. Under the title “Great Romanian Artists. Ion Alin Gheorghiu”, the issue will be introduced into circulation on Friday, January 26th this year.
One of the most important postmodernist artists, Ion Gheorghiu, (1929-2001), Alin for friends, for 45 years established himself among the elite of Romanian and international artists, expressing himself in painting, sculpture, decorative art and, sometimes, in writing. He was a tenure member of the Romanian Academy.
An original artist, for whom talent means, above all, a great responsibility, intelligent and cultivated, diligent and laborious, with a relentless discipline of daily work (‘Inspiration, if it exists, must find you at the easel with the brush in hand’), using only traditional means, developed a perfect technique of glazes, smears, scholarly over lays – a square centimetre of any of his canvases is a gem. He moved naturally from figurative to non-figurative, gradually, without surprising leaps, each stage of his creation being equally captivating and recognizable.
Alin Gheorghiu’s works give the images a permanent halo of surprising novelty. The ‘labyrinth’ of his canvases simultaneously highlights the mystery and the path. Like any great artist, Alin Gheorghiu is difficult to frame didactically. He is original without ostentation; he is stylistically and historically cultivated. Gheorghiu’s art is difficult to define. It is to be admired, to be enjoyed as a guide in the miracle of visuality.
An art that does not describe, but recreates, Gheorghiu’s painting, generically named, since some time (1970) THE HANGING GARDEN, where morphologies and natural forms – seed, flower, fruit – explode into deformations of structures concentrically entraining infinitely reverberating waves of propagation, reunites later after 1985 in untitled COMPOSITIONS, organic compositions from the same archetypal forms gathered into a unitary whole, with a sacred feeling, a variant of the mountain as an image of the world, as an image of the earth-sky connection. This series inspired by the icon of the Mother of God and its interpretations after the portraits of the Italian painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo, without the will of the painter, acquired the name MADONE over time. The filiation from the icon on glass is evident not only through the chromatics, but also through the ever-present drawing, the coordinating skeleton of its forms. The innocence of the humble anonymous icon painter, his “heartbeats”, are felt in Gheorghiu’s painting, they gild the image with lyricism and harmony.
The sculptures – CHIMAERAS – a bold leap into space, not only fulfil the fundamental idea of pictorial forms, but live with an unusual monumental force. Ion Alin Gheorghiu cannot be included in any movement, through a work of overwhelming vastness he built a parallel, credible world, another reality based on precise laws, break and balance.
The postage stamps with the face values of Lei 2 and Lei 4 reproduce two paintings belonging to a personal artistic concept known as the field of “hanging gardens”. The postage stamp with the face value of Lei 22 reproduces a painting known as “Composition”. The postage stamp of the souvenir sheet with the face value of Lei 33 reproduces a sculpture by Ion Alin Gheorghiu, entitled “Chimaera”. The First Day Cover displays a composition that combines the image of the painter’s portrait with an artistic creation representative of the characteristic style of his works.
Romfilatelia thanks Mrs. Anamaria Smigelschi, the painter’s wife, for the documentary support granted to the development of this issue of postage stamps.
