Body and Space in the Paintings by George Gheorghe

By David Zimmerman

Notwithstanding the veneer of George Gheorghe’s surrealistic, vertiginous atmosphere that confronts the viewer in the preliminary stages of beholding the work, over time something haunting, even unsettling, permeates his paintings. This is the result of the artist’s sophisticated pictorial intelligence, which recognizes the value of indicating spatio-temporal displacement reminiscent on some level of the teasing work of Escher’s in order to draw the eye and the mind to the space of space of possibility that can only be aroused by enigma and paradox. The artist’s overall ideological ambition is to frame philosophical issues which obviously compel him. These are set within an order of the mind intent on circulating questions around the designations of sameness and difference, separateness and integratedness, volition and the involuntary, destiny and fate.

The artist is compelled by the presence of emerging (or emergent) energy; his intention is to bring into visual play visual analogies that refer to the affects of causality, as well as to the condition of dependence/interdependence/independence and to human agency itself. He manages to incorporate the sensation of game-like space being co-habituated by floating figures. The sensations of separating and connecting evoke the anxiety-ridden condition of being adrift in an ocean of time-space. This is depicted as exhilarating on one level yet one is clearly open in terms of being seen, open to the judgments of others.

The notion of exiting our everyday world and entering a continuum of non-separation from the things around us, being those things and those things being us.In his works George Gheorghe allows us entry into a vision that signals the emergence of a new world. The artist implies not only that the spatial body is dynamic and that this dynamic is the very condition which allows the world to become manifest in and through consciousness. The body is interpreted in both its narrowest and its widest sense; body of being, human body, body of mind, space, thought, time etc. Is the body in control of its own physical destiny (or determination)? And if so how are we to picture the indeterminate horizons (both internal and external in the sense of the physiological and in terms of outside stimuli).

On another level the artist seems to suggest that there is a supra-mundane world that not only co-exists with the world of empiricism and intellectualisms but also is bound within the groundedness of reality. The slippage from ties of social conditioning is further implicated through George Gheorghe’s depiction hovering humans. The artist explores through various depictions the spatiality of the body itself and motility. Its vision asserts that there is a continuum of thought / perception which validates and nullifies the condition of what might be called “the sensory givens” of physiological and somatic existence. What we can all share in the viewing of this work is an artist engaged in the process of creation whose very subject is creation itself.