member of:Observers of the Interdependence of Domestic Objects and Their Influence on Everyday Life


This group has been active for a long time and has already made some remarkable assertions which render life simpler from the practical point of view. For example, I move a pot of green color five centimeters to the right, I push in the thumbtack beside the comb and if Mr. A (another adherent like me) at this moment puts his volume about bee-keeping beside a pattern for cutting out vests, I am sure to meet on the sidewalk of the avenida Madero a woman who intrigues me and whose origin and address I never could have known...
--Remedios Varo


(Slideshow is of Artwork by Remedios Varo)
By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired.
--Franz Kafka

Wednesday, June 27, 2012

Georges Mazilu


All paintings in this post are by Georges Mazilu:








Georges Mazilu was born in Romany in 1951 and studied at the Grigorescu Art Institute in Bucharest, but in 1982, he fled Ceausescu's regime and was able to settle in France, where he remains. This tearing apart of the person that results from a forced exile from a beloved homeland, as well as from watching one's compatriots tear each other apart in an attempt to survive the dictatorship themselves--the feeling of a disjointed humanity, a not completely real existence in a not completely real place which isn't quite tailored for a creature just like yourself--that feeling is expressed with delicate beauty in Mazilu's work.




L'eventail, by Georges Mazilu




A curious thing happens to these creatures under Mazilu's gaze:


Le Cure, by Georges Mazilu

Above, the priest, who, with no hands or feet, has yet created of himself a way to move from here to there. His faith, I assume, makes him able to float above the ground, as if he were riding a bike.


His paintings seem to mix the Northern Renaissance style of clarity of light, of a certain vibrance of color, of large spaces lost to shadow, and of soft gazes just off to the side--moments of portraiture---with a surrealist balancing of limbs, of activities, of clothing, and ideas. 


Le Reine des Myrtilles, by Georges Mazilu


Le Chat Verte, by Georges Mazilu

Here is


a painting entitled the Birdcatcher, where the catcher cannot catch with hands, but does so by providing a generous and apparently danger-free invitation, by growing an extra limb--not an arm, but a tree-limb, a branch--from his head. His colors match the coloring of the bird, which, as David Attenborough tells us in his fabulous videos, is a classic evolutionary technique to attracting birds as mates or as pollinators (for example a nut will have the same pattern as a female/male bird's chest, so the bird will crack it open to eat, and let fly the little seeds...)

In fact, perhaps it is through this attempt to connect with others that we become real:



La Femme au Renard, by Mazilu 

See also the way we create: 



Le nu academique: Here the painters are less solid than their creation, the model of flesh who walks towards us, almost real, more like "us" than her creators. We create, and then our creations create...and we become whole, alive...

or



L'ange du pelerin: the Pilgrim's Angel, who, being necessary for journey, has not just wings--homemade ones, it seems--, but comes naturally seated (for a feeling of rest) and also has the propeller on her head, perhaps for those with wanderlust who can't (for whatever reason) physically travel, and so must do it via their own heads (imagination).



Le Poupee Fleurie



Le Surfeur



Monument pour Picasso
Discovered via Form is Void: http://thombeau.blogspot.com/

3 comments:

  1. magnifique peinture.. qui te correspond !!!!

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  2. Hi

    Thank you so much for introducing the surreal paintings by Georges Mazilu. Oh they are really interesting and lovely!! Love the Pilgrim's Angel! I wonder where these little people live....

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