{"id":122730,"date":"2024-04-03T12:26:48","date_gmt":"2024-04-03T10:26:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/?p=122730"},"modified":"2024-04-08T16:54:42","modified_gmt":"2024-04-08T14:54:42","slug":"alexandru-chira-artist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/2024\/04\/03\/alexandru-chira-artist\/","title":{"rendered":"Alexandru Chira and the inhabitable artistic edifice"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In his philosophic testament, Romanian writer and philosopher Lucian Blaga describes a mythological place whose vistas and perspectives \u201cdeepened and rose\u201d with each step, opening onto the mysteries and revelations of a world perceived as a totality. This extraordinary place, the village<\/em>, is \u201csituated at the center of existence and its geography extended right into mythology and metaphysics.\u201d (1) Painter Alexandru Chira\u2019s childhood spent in T\u0103u\u0219eni, near Cluj-Napoca, provided an open door to the metaphysics of its topography. \u201cFor him, the village was a cosmogonic, speculative system akin to that depicted in Lucian Blaga\u2019s philosophy writings,\u201d (2) suggests art theorist and curator C\u0103lin Dan. Having studied painting in Cluj-Napoca and Bucharest, Chira later became a professor at the National University of Arts in the Romanian capital, where he stayed until his death, in 2011. Despite having lived an intellectual life afar from the village he grew up in, the formative years, the \u201cmysterious aspects, horizons and secret structures of the village\u201d discovered in childhood modelled his \u201csoul substance\u201d, (3) as Blaga would put it, as well as his artistic identity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From this imaginative time of heightened sensibility, Alexandru Chira drew significant objects that inhabited and structured it, to create a repertoire of image-signs. Many of these elements were the agricultural and domestic implements used in the practical life of the village: the weaving shuttle, the oil lamp, the planting bed, the spinning wheel, the tractor, the thresher, the spark plug, the fuel tank and so on. They referenced the external, familiar world \u2013 the perimeter of the courtyard and the village \u2013 immersed in layers of memory and tradition. Less explicitly, his icons took record of the history of his family and their community amid brutal social change: the confiscation of agricultural land and machinery, the alienation of peasants through forced industrialization, and an overall dissolution of the rural identity during communism. Seen in this light, the valorisation of evocative elements which used to circumscribe a collective life threatened with disintegration reads as a subtle, but continuous political undercurrent in Chira\u2019s artistic practice. (4)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Alexandru
Alexandru Chira,\u2028 Bell of the Riot – Nest-Bell – Mechanical – Poem, 1977\u2028. Signed and dated.\u2028 Oil, ink and pencil on canvas,\u2028 115 x 196 cm\u2028, 45 1\/4 x 77 1\/8 in.\u2028 Courtesy of the estate of Alexandru Chira and Fitzpatrick Gallery, Paris Photo \u00a9 Maria Studio, Cassandre Villautreix, Reto Schmid.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Alexandru Chira resists being placed in a certain stylistic category; his art, hermetic, bewildering, difficult to pin down. C\u0103lin Dan writes of the difficult task that falls on the viewer, from whom Chira demands a \u201cdetectives\u2019 tenacity\u201d and \u201cpoetic inspiration\u201d (5), but also on the art critic, for whom Dan believes he has placed \u201ca series of hermeneutic snares, ultimately meant to be playful.\u201d (6) Thus, some clues are welcome in accessing an apparently sealed visual-poetic edifice. Emerging at first in dark drawings of immediate, hectic, almost violent character, Chira\u2019s imagery was later distilled in precisely articulated, balanced paintings that rely on the purposeful tension between means of expression and composition: text and image, drawing and colour, the registers of the work. These internal relationships will constitute our routes to interpretation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Drawing, colour and the aspiration for poetry<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chira\u2019s works began with a drawing. This was the initial, foundational act. (7) But, being a prolific writer and theoretician authoring a philosophic discourse around his art, Chira has stressed in his essays and interviews that, for him, drawing was not merely a way of occupying and defining the surface of the canvas, neither did it have anything to do with resemblance, or the \u201cnostalgic or journalistic return to motif.\u201d (8) Rather, the artist was working with the idea of \u201edrawing as a project\u201d, that built an \u201earticulated architecture for signification intended for spiritual habitation\u201d. (9)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Alexandru
Alexandru Chira,\u2028 The Senses Rose (Study for Stereo-Poem), 1982\u2028. Signed and dated\u2028. Oil and pencil on canvas,\u2028 170 x 180 cm\u2028, 66 7\/8 x 70 7\/8 in.\u2028 Courtesy of the estate of Alexandru Chira and Fitzpatrick Gallery, Paris Photo \u00a9 Maria Studio, Cassandre Villautreix, Reto Schmid.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Drawing was complemented by colour. For art historian Ruxandra Demetrescu, the role that their symbiotic relationship played for Chira, a Poussinist in her view, exemplifies the definitions of painting put forth in the French art literature at end of the 17th<\/sup> century, in which drawing was described as the genus<\/em> of painting, while colour, the specific difference<\/em>. (10)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A more unsettled relationship is that depicted by C\u0103lin Dan: an exhausting circuit of dominance and submission between the male principle of drawing \u2013 a \u201ctormented, but solid skeleton\u201d \u2013 and the feminine, calm principle of the colour enveloping it. (11) From this dynamic, drawing emerges in Chira\u2019s mature and late works as the \u201corganising principle, an instrument for measuring the clarity of the message.\u201d (12) At the same time, the colour palette becomes more restrained, the image is purged of spontaneous gestural expression and painterliness, so that its status is set to \u201ccolour coats as transparent screens\u201d, \u201ca filter or lens for shading or reading an existing state in the drawing\u201d. (13) <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Alexandru
Alexandru Chira<\/strong>, Stereopoems<\/em>. Installation view, Fitzpatrick Gallery, Paris, Jun 30 \u2013 July 29, 2023. Courtesy of the estate of Alexandru Chira and Fitzpatrick Gallery, Paris. Photo \u00a9 Thomas Lannes.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Such statements and interpretations, albeit confusing and apparently contradictory, must not mislead the viewer, for Chira reminds us that, in the end, what he was working towards, his ideal project, was a Painting<\/em>. (14) In one of his recurring dialogs with theoreticians Radu Procopovici and Theodor Redlow, the artist offers one of the most beautiful and memorable ideas on the problem of colour in painting: \u201cBorderline immaterial, colour remains particularly important for me. It helps me fulfil my aspiration to poetry<\/em>\u201d. (15)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A visual rhetoric<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Making-up Chira\u2019s artworks are visual elements and fragments of written words, formulas, diagrams, lists etc. In earlier works, the text is denser, like an inky web interfering with the paintings, paradoxically obscuring its reading. This density seems to draw attention to the canvas itself, a physical support for marks on a surface, and thus to its two-dimensionality. Later, the writing becomes more condensed and gets absorbed into the image. (16) <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Without losing its essential, creative role, the written sign is transposed into image-sign, sustaining the work\u2019s power of projection into three-dimensionality.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Alexandru
Alexandru Chira<\/strong>\u2028, The Cube of the Senses – Project for Stereo-poem, 1991\u2028. Signed and dated\u2028. Pencil, ink, colored ink, and watercolor on paper mounted on cardboard \u2028 66 x 97 cm,\u2028 26 x 38 1\/4 in\u2028. Courtesy of the estate of Alexandru Chira and Fitzpatrick Gallery, Paris Photo \u00a9 Maria Studio, Cassandre Villautreix, Reto Schmid.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Partly capitalised, the written text almost always doubles the visual icon. One of the effects of this approach of approximate translation of terms from verbal to figural image has been perceived as the emergence of \u201ctwo identities [of the same sign] that undermine each other through redundancy.\u201d (17) However, Chira has discussed this strategy as both a setting of meanings and an opening up through polyphony and multiple reverberations caused by replay. (18) He has also stressed the short-circuiting<\/em> sought through the multilayering of images and words. (19) The ensuing associations of surrealist character  \u2013 which also shows up in the typology of the images, and some of the artist\u2019s means of expression (20) \u2013 recode each element in relation to the other. Their juxtaposition creates what Juri Lotman would term \u201can exceptionally strong semantic effect\u201d. (21) Thus the image becomes a text in a semiotic sense, in which all the elements form part of a single text conjuring the viewer\u2019s interpretation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chira\u2019s repertoire of symbols, increasingly restricted and refined through the strategy of repetition and resuming of icons, of summarising and encapsulation of meaning, reflects the clarifying aim of his artistic project, that will finally emerge, three-dimensional, into the landscape. Through the exploration of the opacity-depth, figure-ground relations, the iconic and symbolic systems of representation, and the nature of beholding, his work becomes a constant investigation into the processes of depiction and the mechanisms of image creation.His preoccupation with meaning and language inspired Chira to devise words and expressions meant to encapsulate the poetic and <\/em>conceptual nature of his artistic project. In the 1980\u2019s he came up with the expression de-sign <\/em>[de-semn<\/em>], playing with the meaning-making character of the sign, whose invocative power he regarded as both poetic and operational. (22)  This dual quality \u2013 poetic and projecting, metaphoric and functional \u2013 is reaffirmed in his recurrent concepts of the tele-poem<\/em> or the parcel-poem<\/em>, which can be sent anywhere. The stereo-poem,<\/em> and the functional poem<\/em>, the latter defined by Chira as \u201ca certain state of aggregation and flow of \u2018words\u2019\u201d (23)  enrich his repertoire of poematic vehicles for communication. For instance, the works titled Packege-poems<\/em> resemble sheets of paper written and drawn on just as one would in a letter, that have been folded like a partly closed envelope \u2013 a heptagon \u2013 or rather, caught in the moment of it being opened, of accessing its meaning. (24) The later stereo- and tele- poems take on variations of the recurring geometric shape of the heptagon, which represents the cell of life and \u201cestablishes the geometric locus of ideal expression.\u201d (25) <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Drawing in space: The monumental ensemble from T\u0103u\u0219eni<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1994, the Soros Centre for Contemporary Art in Bucharest organised the exhibition 01010101<\/em>, based on a call for projects. Several artists were commissioned to intervene in various communities and unconventional spaces. It was the starting point of the monumental ensemble from T\u0103u\u0219eni. Designed as the beginning of a larger project, From Hill to Hill to Vienna<\/em>, [Din deal \u00een deal p\u00e2n\u0103 la Viena<\/em>] the land-art intervention was never completed and remains \u201cpartly rapt in mystery and only partly rediscovered.\u201d (26)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a short interview on participatory Romanian art, curator and critic Irina Cios describes how Chira managed to convince the community, the local authorities and his relatives to contribute in creating a monumental artwork in the small village, in close proximity to his family house, by making a road for access, providing materials for its construction, donating the land on which it was to be built. (27) She depicts scenes in which the artist is explaining his conceptual artistic thinking to the villagers in such a fascinating way that the community would subsequently take up the project as their own, caring for it, and generating new mythologies that contributed to its identity. (28) Irina Cios remembers the joy and surprise of visiting the ensemble 5 years after having been inaugurated, when an old lady, a grandmother<\/em> from the village, gave her a proper guided tour, explaining the meaning of each element forming Chira\u2019s abstract installation. (29) A recent visit paints a more pessimistic scenario, likening it to \u201ca pilgrimage to the ruins\u201d (30) of another age, for the project has been partly abandoned, slowly decaying, mirroring the realities of the rural world. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Villaggio
Tauseni Village.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Titled De-signs to the Sky for Rain and Rainbow<\/em> [De-semne spre cer pentru ploaie \u0219i curcubeu<\/em>], the ensemble is a \u201cthought drawn in plain sight.\u201d (31) It transposes in sculptural components some of the recurrent elements of Chira\u2019s visual universe depicted until then on the support of paper or canvas. The background and destination of the work is the blue sky. Its basis, the hill that had been a launch pad for his childhood experiments as an inventor. As an artist, he reconfigures the landscape as a plinth for sculpture, and the travel, as a spiritual departure: \u201cFrom this hill, I dreamed all my childhood of flying off to the moon \u2013 a failure guaranteed by my attempt. Thus, later I decided that art makes it possible to fly off spiritually and vanquish technical pragmatism and the laws of inertia and gravity defining it, through poetic utopia<\/em>.\u201d (32)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

 In accessing Chira\u2019s utopia, the visitor must follow a ritualic path with several conceptual registers. From The Shepherd’s House<\/em>, the starting point, one takes the 66 steps of the Sower\u2019s Stairway<\/em>, \u201cthe spine of the ensemble,\u201d (33) to the symmetrically placed Revolving Icon for Rain and Rainbow<\/em> \u2013 an invocation device whose function was accomplished on the day of the inauguration \u2013 and House of the Firebird or the House of Rain<\/em>, situated at the centre of the plateau, where the vertical axis is aligned with the axis mundi. (34) The spiritual itinerary continues from one symbolic element to another, opening up through the vertical axis and radial plane, reaching the plateau of the de-signs in the upper part of the hill, \u201call the way to \u2018the exit from the project\u2019 \u2013 towards the sky.\u201d (35) <\/p>\n\n\n\n

On the neighbouring hill, Chira installed De-Sign for Sighting<\/em>. Seen through this shape, the entire work is framed within a hexagon. The sighting from afar of its geometry coincides with viewing the conceptual backbone of his entire \u201cartistic edifice.\u201d (36) Like his House of the Geometrician<\/em> (of the one who is always designing)<\/em>, the architecture of Chira\u2019s ideal project is characterised by \u201ca simultaneous multi-inhabitance: everyone can enter there, in order to conceive or to read his own projects or even to redesign himself.\u201d (37) It is an artistic edifice projected for the shared space of the artist and the beholder, its open character actualized on the pathway following the coloured drawing on the hill.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Villaggio
Tauseni Village.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\n

[1] Lucian Blaga, \u201cPraise of the Romanian village\u201d [Elogiu satului rom\u00e2nesc], Revista Limba Rom\u00e2n\u0103, no. 2, year XXVII, 2017, 147-48.
[2] C\u0103lin Dan, \u201cThe Obsession of Synchronicity: on the Challenge to Build the History of Recent Romanian Art\u201d, in Alexandru Chira, eds, C\u0103lin Dan, M\u0103d\u0103lina Ionescu, Editura M.N.A.C., Bucharest, 2022, 11.
[3] Blaga, \u201cPraise of the Romanian village\u201d, 147.
[4] M\u0103d\u0103lina Ionescu, \u201eAlexandru Chira\u201d, in Alexandru Chira, 78.
[5] Dan, \u201cAnother Kind of Conceptualism\u201d, in Alexandru Chira, 18-19.
[6] Dan, \u201cThe Obsession of Synchronicity\u201d, 8.
Dan, \u201cAnother Kind of Conceptualism\u201d, 18-19.
[7] Theodor Redlow, \u201cProiectul Ideal\u201d [The Ideal Project], Alexandru Chira in conversation with Theodor Redlow, Revista Arta, 4\/ 1982, 12.
[8] Alexandru Chira, \u201cProiectul Ideal\u201d, 12.
[9] Chira, \u201cProiectul Ideal,\u201d 14.
[10] Ruxandra Demetrescu, book launch of Alexandru Chira monograph, eds., C\u0103lin Dan, M\u0103d\u0103lina Ionescu, M.N.A.C. Publishing House, Bucharest, 2022. Online discussion moderated by C\u0103lin Dan, with Ruxandra Demetrescu, M\u0103d\u0103lina Ionescu and Diana Marincu, last access on March 7th 2024, https:\/\/m.facebook.com\/mnacbucharest\/videos\/monografia-alexandru-chira\/708812047269529\/?locale=hi_IN .
[11] Dan, \u201cAnother Kind of Conceptualism\u201d, 22.
[12] Dan, \u201cAnother Kind of Conceptualism\u201d, 23.
[13] Chira, \u201cStudii pentru o expozi\u021bie\u201d [Studies for an exhibition], conversation with Radu Procopovici and Theodor Redlow, published in Alexandru Chira, Cuvinte pentru ochi [Words for the Eyes]: essays, dialogues, articles etc., Charmides Publishing House, 2007, 241.
[14] Chira, \u201cProiectul Ideal\u201d, 14, author\u2019s emphasis.
[15] Chira, \u201cStudii pentru o expozi\u021bie\u201d, 241.
[16] Chira, \u201cStudii pentru o expozi\u021bie\u201d, 237-38.
[17] Dan, \u201cAnother Kind of Conceptualism\u201d, 19.
[18] Chira, \u201cProiectul Ideal\u201d, 12.
[19] Chira, \u201cProiectul Ideal\u201d, 12.
[20] Dan, \u201cThe Obsession of Synchronicity\u201d, 11.
[21] Jurij Lotman, Universe of the Mind. A Semiotic Theory of Culture, Tauris & Co, London-New York, 1990, 41.
[22] Ionescu, \u201eAlexandru Chira\u201d, in Alexandru Chira, 79. \u201cSemn\u201d is the word for \u201csign\u201d or \u201cmark\u201d in Romanian, while \u201ca desemna,\u201d means to name or designate, and is only a letter away from \u201cto draw\u201d [a desena].
[23] Chira, \u201cProiectul Ideal\u201d, p. 14.
[24] Chira, \u201cStudii pentru o expozi\u021bie\u201d, 237-38.
[25] Chira, \u201cStudii pentru o expozi\u021bie\u201d, 242.
[26] Diana Marincu, \u201cThe Invisible is Real. Alexandru Chira and the Endless Work\u201d, in Alexandru Chira, 48.
[27] Irina Cios, \u201cArta participativ\u0103 \u00een Rom\u00e2nia,\u201d ACCESS ART interview series by Asocia\u021bia Cultural\u0103 Contrasens, published on September 15th, 2020, https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=Lqb7KbztO-U&ab_channel=Asocia%C8%9BiaCultural%C4%83Contrasens.
[28] Cios, \u201cArta participativ\u0103 \u00een Rom\u00e2nia\u201d.
[29] Cios, \u201cArta participativ\u0103 \u00een Rom\u00e2nia\u201d.
[30] Dan, \u201cThe Obsession of Sincronicity\u201d, 12.
[31] Chira, \u201cDiscursul de pe Deal (II). Discurs de ini\u021biere,\u201d speech held on September 25th, 1995, in Chira, Cuvinte pentru ochi, 175.
[32] Chira, \u201cDiscursul de pe Deal (VII).\u201d [The speech on the hill] speech held on September 1st, 2000, in Chira, Cuvinte pentru ochi, 184.
[33] Chira\u2019s description of the ensemble, apud. Ionescu, \u201eAlexandru Chira\u201d, 80.
[34] Chira\u2019s description of the ensemble, apud. Ionescu, \u201eAlexandru Chira\u201d, 81.
[35] Chira\u2019s description of the ensemble, apud. Ionescu, \u201eAlexandru Chira\u201d, 81.
[36] Chira, \u201cProiectul ideal\u201d, 12.
[37] Chira, \u201cProiectul Ideal\u201d, 14.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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