Stereopoems

Alexandru Chira (1947-2011) studied painting in Cluj and Bucharest between 1966 and 1972, during a brief window of cultural acceptance sanctioned by the Romanian Communist regime. Immediately following Nicolae Ceausescu’s accession to power in 1965, and shortly after the re-Stalinization following his visits to China and North Korea in 1971, culture and arts flourished with an influx of Western influences. Pop art, abstraction, photorealism, land art, conceptualism, performance art and environmental art became by-words for innovation and were rapidly assimilated into the local art scene, leaving behind the loathed Socialist Realism.

Like his colleagues, Chira was initially schooled in a realist vein. Yet, like most of the ambitious younger artists of the time, he soon embraced new languages and practices. He faced the same conundrum of making progressive art in an increasingly regressive and repressive milieu. Chira fused together neo-avant-garde means and practices, ranging from abstraction, conceptualism, installations, land art and film, with contrasting, conservative outlooks, like the cryptic or mystical ritualism placed at the very core of his system.

The resulting, contradictory mixture of apparently research-oriented, complex and systematic work with evanescent visions of outlandish, uncharted territories of archaic decompensation mark his unique output of crystal-clear forms saturated with foggy, bewildering gist.

His mythological and utopian, personal universe is rooted in tradition, but presented in an avant-garde visual idiom. The recurrent, key figures of his world derive from his childhood in the countryside. They echo age-old landmarks of dwelling, labouring and dreaming: houses, barns, tractors, threshers, seed beds, fountains, windows, mirrors, lamps and spindles. Brimful lyricism fills the gaps between the crisp, rigorous shapes and the fuzzy, nostalgic senses. No wonder that despite their sophisticated symbols and geometries, the works frequently seem to convey abstracted portraits: lips, noses, mouths and ears are easily discernible.

Chira’s idiosyncratic iconography paraphrases farm life, but it also reflects the communist propaganda centred on the industrial progress in agriculture: technical machineries substitute the objects of religious life. The village yard as “autarchic existential cell” functions for Chira as a “gear-poem” to conjure “rain and rainbows” for “spiritual germination”, and fight against extinction. Self-centred, his work displays mythological symbols vested as rational schemes. Gem-like, peculiar geometries radiate an oneiric, hermetic appeal, recalling the mandala constructions of Hilma af Klint or Adolf Wölfli, and Joseph Cornell’s surrealist montages.

Stereopoems maps the becoming of Chira’s work. From the realist and almost narrative, horizontal construction of Bell of the Riot - Nest-Bell - Mechanical - Poem (1977), with its utterly recognisable human figures and engineering or labouring instruments reflecting the progressive pageantry of communist propaganda, up until the later, iconic altar-piece-like, rhombus-shaped Geometer’s House - Study for Tele-Poem (1990), with its synthetic rendering of an exclusively ego-centric ritual focused on the striking, experimental use of polenta as painting medium, one can follow the astounding process of extracting sheer originality and compelling aesthetic quality out of conflicting dogmas and depleted, but transfigured, artistic practices, mirroring Romania’s tortuous cultural history.

— Erwin Kessler

Alexandru Chira (1947, Tauseni, Romania - +2011, Bucharest, Romania) was an artist and Professor at the Painting Department of the Faculty of Fine Arts, Bucharest National University of Arts. When his home village Tauseni suffered a yearlong drought during the 1990s Chira started to elaborate sophisticated land-and-weather improving art equipments, a series of symbolic installations of painted metal, wire and concrete for the invocation of rain and rainbows. The ensemble De-signs towards the sky for the rain and the rainbow (1994 - 2004) is located on a hill in the middle of the village, surrounded by other hills and divided into 18 sub-ensembles.

Chira’s works have been presented in the context of various exhibitions, including the Lisbon Architecture Triennale, Palácio Sinel de Cordes, Lisbon; The Sao Paolo Biennial Art Exhibition, Sao Paolo; The Visual Arts Museum, Galati; and The National Museum of Contemporary Art (MNAC), Bucharest, which presented a retrospective of the artist in 2015.

The first major publication of Chira’s work was released in December 2022, and features essays in Romanian, with translations in English, by Ionut Cioana, Diana Marincu, Alexandra Titu, Calin Dan, and Marina Ionescu.

Stereopoems is the first exhibition of Chira’s work in France, and the first time the work has been presented by Fitzpatrick Gallery.