On National Culture Day, January 15, 2025, Arbor.art.room opened the exhibition “Solitude. The leitmotif of the painter Gheorghe Jankov,” curated by art historian Ludmila Toma. The exhibition presents a series of portraits and landscapes from the Maxim Dovbîș collection, works that reveal, a few decades after the plastic artist’s death, the boldness of artistic searches in the complicated socio-political context of Bessarabia in the second half of the last century.
Gheorghe Jancov (b. 1921, Voznesensk, Mikolaiv reg., Ukraine – d. 1991, Chisinau, Republic of Moldova), a graduate of the Art School in Odesa (1941), organically joined, in the 1950s, among the innovative painters of Bessarabia. A practitioner of all genres of painting, he became a member of the Union of Plastic Artists (1963) and went through several stages of creation. He perfected his plastic culture in the context of tonal painting, then, in the 1960s – of the “thaw” -he tended towards a decorative expressiveness obtained through the rhythmicity of abstracted forms and chromatic accords. The compositions from the late period are distinguished by the dominant graphic style (Portretul gimnastei Larisa Robu, 1971; Poet Gheorghe Vodă, 1977).
In paintings with an industrial theme, the detailed drawing of the human figure is combined with amplified industrial forms, typical of Léger’s Cubism (Portrait of the engineer P. E. Homenco, 1970).
The artist often simplified in a “primitivist” style, but the process was organic, conditioned by character traits, by the sensitivity of his sincere and open soul. The simple reasons of country life attracted him the most. To characterize people of different ages and destinies, he found various means of working with drawing and color. In some cases, he typified certain external signs (Moș Vasile Furunduc, 1969); in others, he stylized the features of the face, referring to ornamental models (Girl from Pârjolteni, 1968). The landscapes of the edges of villages or cities often include inscriptions with massive letters, but these conceptual methods do not prevent the artist from harmonizing chromatic correspondences, sometimes unexpected: for example, dark cherry spots and olive trees (Fântâna, 1967).
Despite the diversity of subjects, loneliness is distinguished as a leitmotif in Gheorghe Jancov’s works. It’s the feeling conveyed by the figures of sad women (Bătrănă la porte, 1968; Văduva, 1970), abandoned old men (Rămași singuri, 1974), and even the pole to which a megaphone is attached, in front of a club on a deserted street (Zăduf, 1968).
Artistic biography by Ludmila Toma, art critic
The exhibition can be visited until February 15, 2025.
VISIT SCHEDULE:
12.00 – 18.00│Wednesday – Saturday
Closed│Sunday – Tuesday
