Nicolae CHIRILOVICI, Fruit Picking

oil, plywood
69 x 89 cm
signed lower left in black: N. Chirilovici
good state of preservation


CHIRILOVICI  Nicolae (1910, Ujgorod, Transcarpatia, Ukraine - 1993, Arad, Romania)
Artistic education: he studied in Arad with the academic painter Friederich BALLA and professor Marcel OLINESCU (1927-1930), in Baia Mare with MIKOLA András and KRISJÁN János within the School of Fine Arts (1930-1932).
He made his debut in 1932, in an exhibition with Petru FEIER, in Arad. Between 1932 and 2010 he organized 10 personal exhibitions, most of them in Arad, Timisoara (1961). During the interwar period, he participated in most of the group exhibitions in Arad. After 1945 his works were present in the group exhibitions in Arad, in the interregional ones in Timișoara, and in the traveling exhibitions of the Arad branch of the Union of Fine Artists in Bucharest, Oradea, Baia Mare, Odobești, Petroșani, Alba Iulia or abroad in Békéscsaba (1971) and Szarvas (1972) in Hungary, in Subotica, Zrenianin (1974) and Ecka (1979) in Yugoslavia. He was one of the founding members of the Arad branch of the Union of Fine Artists (1951).
Works signed by Chirilovici are in state and private collections in the country and private collections in Italy, Germany, Hungary, Switzerland, Austria, the Netherlands, England, Israel, Canada, USA.

Considering the impact of the artists from Baia Mare on Nicolae Chirilovici's formation [1] we can say that the painter from Arad is the product of the artistic “climate” of Baia Mare rather than of the “school”. His case is interesting because of this. He managed an admirable personal synthesis, as an expression of a Transylvanian artistic “modernity”. His use of color derives from poetic fova. The arbitrary choice of colors is the most visible proof, but not the only one, of the absolute freedom of interpretation offered by fovism. In Chirilovici's landscapes we discover trees with blue trunks, intense red gates or fences, roofs of purple houses and "thrown" shadows painted in a dense ultramarine blue. The shapes are cut clearly and sharply. The line (also drawn in an arbitrary color, usually red or ultramarine) closes them, in the manner of a strange "cloissoné". The rhythms of the contour lines cause the vibration of the pictorial ensemble.
”In their localities, the colors are exalted in pure and bright tones, without touching violence. Aiming to reproduce the colorful spectacle of nature, Chirilovici gives up the illusion of volumes and is not interested in the materiality or weight of things. In this two-dimensional vision, objects are treated as colored surfaces, and those in the depths of space are painted as if seen in the foreground. According to Cézanne's lesson, the impression of the succession of things in space is created only by the juxtaposition and opposition of hot and cold colored areas. Stolen from the natural demands and effects of light, color has become a constructive element and at the same time, an expressive means ”. (Horia Medeleanu, in Arad Art 2007: 50 years of artistic activity, page 33, ed .: Ioan Matiuț, Mirador Publishing House, Arad, 2008).
 

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