142. Homage [1977]

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142. Homage [1977]

Vladimir (Mirel) Zamfirescu

1936, Ploiești - 2020, București

Estimate:

EUR 5.000 - 8.000

Sold

EUR 5.000

References

Catalogue "Vladimir Zamfirescu. Pictură" ("Vladimir Zamfirescu. Paintings"), Prahova County Museum of Art, 2018.

oil on canvas, 125 x 76 cm, signed and dated bottom right, in red, "V.L. Zamfirescu, (19)77"

PROVENANCE

the collection of Dr. Valeriu Tempea.

Reputed personality in local and international art, Vladimir Zamfirescu takes and processes the characteristic features of his master's work, Corneliu Baba, finally reaching artistic apotheosis by perfecting his own style. With works in important museum such as Tate Museum of London, Puskin Museum of Russia or Art Museum of Vatican, the Romanian painter will take, over the years, awards such as The Raffael Medal of the Caravaggio Academy, the title of Doctor Honoris Causa from the Universities of Art of Cluj and Bucharest or the Excellence Award "Nicolae Grigorescu" of the Romanian Employers' Union. The artist puts on the canvas the memory of his experiences, his doubts or melancholy, the agony and ecstasy of his entire existence. The source of his figment of imagination on his canvas are divided between a well-defined cultural cipher and an intensely coded spiritual acrostic. His work is between divinity and myth, so that the artist builds almost iconographic, the biblical path of the scriptural protagonists and incorporates holy characters into his creation. Even in the instances when the artist does not signal by the title the work's appetence for divine origin, the details expose, however, the concerns of his subconscious. The painter uses his narrative vocation in the decontextualization of the shape and the boost of the plastic language. He takes from the peculiarities of the omnipresence of truth in immediate reality, from the characteristics of Byzantine art and from the specificity of classical or modern portraiture, thus managing to preserve the prerogatives necessary to go beyond the framework of emblematic figures. The elongated faces of his characters and the colour made in a phantasmagorical chromatic places Zamfirescu's portraits in the immediate vicinity of El Greco's masterpieces. The elaborate narrative perspective also contributes to the vehement declaration of this affinity. Recurrently light and shade used by the artist also indicates similarities with Caravaggio's work. The physiognomy of the characters appears in a vivid light, while the rest of the body is lost in the darkness of the composition. Zamfirescu is particularly notable as an interpreter of biblical myths, which he rewrites in his own plastic voice and to which he gives a particular attention, reintegrating them into modernity.

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