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Artist Statement:
ARTIST STATEMENT
I have been living in the
United States since the summer
of 1990. When I arrived here,
I had no sense of direction,
artistic or otherwise.
Shifting from my artistic
beliefs rooted in a classical/
humanistic tradition to the
fast-pace of a commercial
culture was bewildering and
...
Further Information
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Artist Exhibitions:
SELECTED EXHIBITS
2009 - 15th Anniversary
Retrospective, The Wisdom
House, Litchfield
- The Litchfield Jazz
Festival, CT
- Square Foot Show,
Artwell Gallery, Torington, CT
- Vignone Gallery,
Glastonbury, CT
- Show for a Show,
Artwell Gallery, Torrington,
CT
- The Living Room
Gallery, NYC
- Good News Café,
Woodbury, CT
- Naugatuck Valley
College, Waterbury, CT
2007 - ...
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Collections:
• St. Francis Medical Center,
Hartford, Connecticut
• Diane Marr, New Hartford,
Connecticut
• Prof. Ilene Reiner,
Connecticut
• Higher Education Center,
Waterbury, Connecticut
• Nell Vismantas, California
• Semina de Laurentis,
Connecticut
• Ruth Lesser Collection,
Connecticut
• Don & Linda Batt Collection,
New York
• Gerda Bolingbroke,
Connecticut
• Karen VanSeters, San
Francisco, California
• Ann Reid, Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania.
...
Further Information
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Reviews for Florin Ion Firimita:
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They are broken but beautiful
Artist's collages reflect a dark past in Romania
BY TRACEY O'SHAUGHNESSY > REPUBLICAN-AMERICAN
The women avert their gaze. They look downward, or away. They are blinded, by ribbon or reluctance. They turn their backs. They shut their eyes. They offer beauty that rots and time that passes. They are incarcerated — and tantalized by butterflies. The figures in Florin Ion Firimită's multimedia works at Good News Cafe are not all women. And they are not all demure. But the female figure commands a hypnotic and ambiguous position in his surrealistic collages.They are gorgeous — all curves and sinews, mystery and majesty. But they are elusive, imprisoned in strange bird cages and metallic dress forms. Either they are incarcerated or splintering apart. In "Muse," a woman grows out of a dress form, her shoulders pinned by two metallic gears. Below, a house painter's brush hardens with inky pink paint. To the side, a woman's hand clutches a rope of chain link. Someone seems conflicted here, between escape and enchainment. So much is going on in Firimită's assemblages that it can be dizzying and destabilizing. Churches grow towers of toast. Classical sculptures hold marionettes of silhouettes. Women hold harlequin masks over their faces, and are shackled in copper cuffs. Wooden palms drop juicy, half-cut apples.These assemblages, formally composed with a wink toward neoclassicism, seem to be as much about velocity as they are about confusion, truncated dreams, missed opportunities and the ever-present scrim of mendacity. Images of women as they are and as fashion sees them — exploited by dress forms and classical images of ideal beauty are diced and divvied up. Thighs stride forward, disembodied; hands collapsed and then shattered in mirrorlike splinters. Catching up with these women, holding them, seeing them clearly and directly, seems impossible. They change and alight, like the butterflies that appear, talismanlike, in so many of these works. Life whizzes by with furious celerity, which is part of its charm and part of its chagrin.
It should be no surprise that Firimită, born in Bucharest, only came to the U.S. in 1990, a year after deposed Romanian President Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife Elena were shot by a firing squad. Someone who spent time behind the Iron Curtain must have been blinded by the speed and abundance of the U.S.
Firimită was the son of a factory worker father and an aristocratic artist mother whose brother had been a cultural attaché to France. After her brother died suddenly in a car accident, and Romanian officials labeled the death a suicide, much of Firimită's mother's hopes died as well. She had hoped her brother would secure her a fashion design studio in Paris. After his death, Firimită said, "I never saw her pick up a pencil again... She was in her own personal prison, really."
Firimită's mother died when he was 17 — just one year after his father and only months after an influential art teacher who had given him the keys to his studio. He spent his senior year living in a hospital, just adjacent to his dying mother, who spent the last six months of her life in a coma.
None of this should be necessary to know, looking at his engaging assemblages, which recall Joseph Cornell and Robert Rauschenberg, but it certainly explains much of the heartache that runs through them. It is a beautiful, mesmerizing, jarring, and trenchant exhibit, about the disjointedness of time and the unbearable brokenness of being.
Rediscovering the Artist Within
By Kelly M. Barth
ARTIS Magazine - April/ May 2005
Isn’t it funny how the views of our world change during the brief journey from childhood to adulthood? Recently, I recalled a memory of my first return visit to my former elementary school. What a trip it was to walk down those same halls I once walked as a child! As I wandered the hallways of my old school, I began to realize something very important about life and myself: although the school itself hadn’t changed much over the years, I had changed, and in many ways so had my perception of the world around me. The challenges and struggles that seemed almost insurmountable as a child, such as reaching the coat-hook to hang up your coat, now as an adult seem almost trivial. As we slowly become adults, our coat-hooks gradually become lower and lower, and as we begin to climb through the chaos and confusion of adulthood, we long to go back to that simple moment in time when it was just you, your coat, and the coat-hook. As we enter the adult phase of our lives, we can often become so wrapped up in deadlines, due dates, and deadlocked rush hour traffic that we begin to lose touch with who we truly are. Today’s modern world is fitted with distractions so numerous it has become almost mind numbing. It’s ironic to think, then, that the chaotic state of the world around us may in fact be good for us in the sense that it has the potential to awaken us...but the choice is ours and ours alone. We as a world can either choose to allow the chaos to consume us, or we can learn from our experiences. The answers are within all of us, and all we need to do is remember — remember ourselves once as children and look at everything around us again with sheer wonder and amazement.
The eyes of a true artist are in many ways similar to the eyes of a child. It is the reason so many people are drawn to art, in that it enables the viewer to reconnect with life if only for a moment. Florin Ion Firimita, a Romanian born artist, author, and philanthropist, has been successfully attempting to explore the realms of growth and inner consciousness in his art for most of his life. “I grew up in Romania at the height of the Cold War. The only acceptable style was socialist realism, and artistic experimentation was considered subversive. So, even if President Bush has managed to turn me to the left, you still won’t see Lenin’s portrait in my bedroom. I am not interested in educating the public. I am interested in exploring universal themes through private questions. I am preoccupied with the issues of identity, love, death, loss, reality versus fiction, dreams and memories,” says Firimita of his artistic objective. Firimita certainly has dealt with these themes first hand, living through and experiencing the intense duality of life’s loving yet brutal nature.
Born in Romania and raised during the Cold War, Firimita found beauty and artistic inspiration in his parents — his father a photographer and his mother a fashion designer and decorative artist. “My parents were very supportive, even if Romania was visibly becoming not a healthy place for art and artists. I also had the chance of being surrounded by great mentors. One of my art teachers, Constantin Ciocarlie, basically handed me the keys to his studio in Bucharest. I spent practically every weekend in that place, from middle school to my senior year in high school, until he died.” Firimita explains. Orphaned in the same year when his beloved mother passed on from cancer, Firimita found comfort in creating art. “I think the process itself for me is therapeutic, and it has been since I was a child. When my maternal grandmother died, the only way my parents knew how to deal with me was to buy me books and watercolors and lock me in their bedroom until everything was over. During my last year of high school, when I was taking care of my mother, I kept drawing day after day after day. There are many personal symbols embedded in my current work: the dress mannequin is a tribute to my mother, and the birdcage is a metaphor for my father’s years in prison — and also for Eastern Europe itself — the labyrinth, symbolizing my journey; the bed as a source of rest and also discomfort symbolizes the woman. I am not sure to what extent they are meant to fill in the missing pieces of the puzzle. There is too much that I don’t know about my life, or my past, and I am OK with it. On the other hand, I believe in what Carlos Castaneda said once, that if there is fog around you, take advantage of it, and use it to transform yourself. Not being defined by these missing parts of my past leaves me plenty of room for change.” Firimita states. Deciding he had nothing left to lose, in 1990 at the age of 25, Florin Ion Firimita made that change and decided to leave Romania behind and make his way to America.
After arriving in the United States, Firimita taught himself English and within a year’s time has mastered the challenging new language enough to attempt to write. Firimita had begun writing a journal while living in Bucharest, documenting the condition of the artist living in a police state both as a form of survival and also release and revenge. “Since I started writing in English in 1990, I have written about a thousand pages. My journal reads both like a collection of recipes and a novel. Sometimes, I write down ideas first, in short paragraphs, and develop them later. Making art is a pretty isolated endeavor, but gathering all the data is the exciting part. I work on several pieces at one time. Sometimes it takes me several days to complete a piece; other times I could spend up to a year on it.” explains Firimita on the development of his writing over the years.
Firimitas’ journal entries became the source of pure inspiration in 2001, when Firimita crossed paths with first-time filmmaker and director Brian Kamerzel. His mother Michele Kamerzel, a fellow teacher and colleague of Firimita at Middlebury Elementary School in Middlebury, Connecticut, introduced Kamerzel to Firimita and his work. In the spring of 2001, Firimita and Kamerzel began work on the proposed project, a documentary film entitled The Art of Leaving, with its roots based in the life and art of Florin Ion Firimita. The film mirrors the process of Firimitas’ art, his journey of rediscovery, and the rebirth of himself as an artist through his exploration and re-introduction to color in life and in the creation of his work. Kamerzel reflects the layering effect of Firimitas’ work in the film in the use of mixed media, the layering of text on the screen, and the artist’s work and writings. The layering of both the Romanian and English languages adds yet another connection for the viewer. The Art of Leaving went on in 2003 to be chosen as an official selection of the 2003 Santa Fe International Film Festival as well as the 2004 Durango (Colorado) Film Festival. Brian Kamerzels’ film The Art of Leaving was screened during Firimitas’ new exhibit, titled, Homework, held at Gallery on the Green in Canton from February 11 – March 13, 2005. Firimita has been a part of Gallery on the Green for the past ten years and is presently represented by White Space Gallery in New Haven. Firimita says of White Space, “For me, being represented by White Space is a confirmation that I have not wasted my time. I will have a solo show there in May. Since I came to this country I have worked in a sweatshop; I have been a dishwasher; I have sold TV sets in a department store. On one hand, it is terribly daunting, but on the other hand, it’s not that bad to have your art shown next to Picasso’s, is it?”
Firimita is currently working on his first novel, The Garden of Eden, which highlights his internal and external struggles as a
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