I loved Gheorghe Ciobanu from the first glance. And then, looking at his paintings, I had second thoughts.
What would an art critic make of him? What is his place among the modern painters?
Is there any comparison with modern masters like Gleb Goloubetski or Simon Balyon?
Or does such a comparison make any sense?
I probably don’t know enough about this elitist art of painting to be the judge.
Then I got to thinking whether you can take this kind of art seriously.
Is it Ok to take a paint more seriously than he takes himself?
But just then I realized I went too far. Cause Gheorghe Ciobanu does take himself seriously.
Look at his self portrait to the left.
His palette is already covered with what look very much like one of his “Seasons” painting.
This is a full artist statement, though not an original one: the painting was already there, I did nothing more than moving it to the canvas.
And his palette goes from his hand to his eye in very a suggestive way.
“I’m a peasant like my parents, although I wanted to be something else, and for a while I wandered through the world but I woke up in time and I realised that another type of life is not for me”
Yes, I can take him seriously. Gheorghe Ciobanu is not just a naive painter. If you look carefully, his works are full of surreal elements.
They have something of Ion Creanga’s fantastic stories. A strange mix of flying horses, giant flowers wit blue leaves and sexual innuendo.
Lots of the paintings I chose for this presentation are totally unexpected. All of them are particularly expressive.
I found a biography on his Pe website with a lot of paragraphs written in first person.
Lot of the things he is saying there are a better description than I will ever be able to do.
“I’ve got maybe hundreds of paintings, I haven’t counted them, I’m happy when I paint and when people like my paintings, when they become enthusiastic because they find in them small lost joys, like cutting the grass in the summer, picking grapes in the fall…”
“My vision of nature and village seen as a spherical universe is what separates me from other naive painters apparently, how many they are left.”
Here are some of the paintings from his site.
Discovering them was a real pleasure. It is a pleasure to present them to you.
