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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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Artist Reviews:
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
...
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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.
...
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Artist Statement for Florin Ion Firimita
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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 exciting in the same time. It took me years of immersing into my new environment in order to find a sense of purpose for what I am doing artistically today. Sometimes during the past three years, a radical shift happened in my art. I have reached a point when being comfortable with my techniques (Eastern European, classically-trained easel painter) became a roadblock. I didn’t have to please anyone. I started looking for a new language based on my divided identity, between Europe and the United States. America is primarily a visual culture. How do we choose? How do we find meaning in this visual pandemonium? Some images are subversive, and feel like rust, slowly decaying our perception of reality. Then, there are the one-nightstands of commercial photography, the streets, the museums, the television, the ads, the movies, the fashion statements, the unforgettable and the forgivable. Other images, the apologizing images of a Golgotha of worn shoes at Auschwitz, the mountains of eye glasses, the suicide bombers, the forgotten tools of introspection of the past century that has failed to see and learn from its own wounds, are competing for our attention as well. We live in an enormous, constantly changing puzzle. I am trying to connect my sensibility with the viewer’s. In this light, my new mixed-media compositions are riddles born out of the juxtaposition of the real and the imagined, the private and the universal, the desire and the cancelled desire. I have been using both symbols linked to my family and my Romanian roots, and found imagery, to which I am not initially related. I love life, and I believe in beauty as a way of putting order in chaos. What I do is a reflection of my interest in philosophy, music, photography, literature, film, nature, and history. I find amazing sources of inspiration in everything surrounding me: my students’ work; my walks around the streets of New York City or Paris; a Mahler symphony; Proust and Borges; a Godard film; a graffiti-covered wall; an old photograph found at a flea market. I am trying to create a sense of mystery in which the viewer is invited to complete my cosmology. Meaning is never a one-way road, and therefore is always a result of a collaboration between what I am trying to communicate, and what you are willing to see.
New York City, September 2009
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contact artist
