ART CRITICS' AND JOURNALISTS' OPINIONS
Cristache Gheorghiu is pre-eminently a paysagist. Not just an occasional or circumstantial one, but one to whom landscape is a way of communicating with other people. I do not know if Cristache Gheorghiu ever wrote poetry, but it is clear that his landscapes are in fact a sort of poems, the poetic word having being replaced with lines and colours... His landscape is a lyrical tale about the world in which the artist lives, from which he picks up the images through which he wants to tell us about his inner feelings at a certain moment and place. For example, a landscape named "Scheii Brasovului"; it is a landscape somehow fabulous in which this district, so familiar to us, the Romanians, is seen from high up, is reduced to its essence, the red-coloured roofs of the houses looking like "small caps", some mushrooms from the shadow of which we expect to see Snow-White and the Seven Dwarfs!
Landscapes, but of another style, are the suggestive "reportage" brought by the artist from America. Emblematic for large urban agglomerations characterised by sky scrapers, works bearing such names as "Sacramento", "Downtown", "New York", "Los Angeles", "Chicago", etc., are American only in their topic, being somewhat different. Something different that bears the artist's spiritual mark, who, in every one of these paintings, tells us about what he felt towards the "New World". The colours, the
lines, the composition in these works are sometimes calm, harmonious articulate, sometimes restless, built in a couterpointed way, the colour meaning, before everything else, an attitude.
A smaller section of the exhibition includes portraits. Every portrait is the artist's bet with himself, trying to grasp the specificity of every sitter. His portraits are similar to "landscapes", a kind of artistic
metaphors.
All the works are in oil, his technique demonstrating tremendous skill and freedom. He is an artist who always leaves opened doors, who knows what he wants and who tries to tell us as much as possible about his feelings.
In nowadays plastic arts of Brasov, Christache Gheorghiu is, undoubtedly, an unconfoundable voice, somewhat like Marin Sorescu in poetry.
Ioan Popa, Gazeta de Transilvania, 7 January 1999
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.... Cristache Gheorghiu distinguishes himself as a creator with multiple possibilities of painting the figurative in a modern, artistic way. He develops the genre of lyric landscape in a realistic way, with a
harmonious language, sensitivity while playing with light and shade. There are two leading lines in his creation: the exactness of the notation and the respect towards the finished work... Cristache Gheorghiu fits with exactness the topic on the page, and wraps it up with profound emotions, increased by his ability to render the surrounding atmosphere. This is the way in which we are presented with the same nook during different moments in time! But, in all these hypostasis, his toils inspire a calm and quiet atmosphere full of equilibrium...
From a series of portraits, the author has chosen only a few, the consequence of a stringent exigency. Compositional portraits which catch an action or a movement, portraits that catch the expression of the soul, portraits which arise from the relation man-landscape...
Cristache Gheorghiu is a master of the perspective, the chromatic sensibility;, he shows a decent and great exigency in the choice of topics, which ensures him already of a well defined place in the world
of Brasov's landscape-painters.
I.O. Flavius - Gazeta de Transilvania, 20 mai 1993
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Mr.Cristache Gheorghiu offers to any lover of beauty a reason of delight. The vitality and the generosity of the colour, the personality of the compositions, the refinement of the artistic language, bring together in these landscapes, descended from the four seasons, a winsome harmony. The open landscapes seem to breathe light. The colour, sometimes in unprecedented association, is bestowed by talent being the bet conquered by the artist with himself and the mirage of the landscapes. It emphasises the basic joy felt by the painter in contact with the nature that he transfigures. The communication is obviously at the level of artistic impression. The works inspire the sensation of tidiness, everything being at its place, the show of nature is thorough, the onlooker cannot be but delighted by the richness of sentiments that overflow these paintings; they are capable of bringing in the onlooker's mind and soul a fragment of the unborn.
Cristache Gheorghiu's paintings deserve attention, the aesthetic satisfaction being guarantee.
Anca Pop, art critic, 15.02.1990
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What a pleasant surprise! These paintings show us an artist with a very sophisticated sense of colour, a master of the composition, of choosing the right landscape, and also a gifted and sensitive portraitist.
Prof. Sasu Ducsoara, februarie 1997
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... Well, sky scrapers do not lack in Cristache Gheorghiu's paintings! As any European who hides in his soul a bit of romanticism, the painter Gheorghiu succeeds in humanising the sky scrapers. Ignoring the detail, impossible to be transfigured in an artistic way due to the size of the subject, the painter knows how to suggest the atmosphere of the big American towns, sky scrapers being only a mark, a symbol.... In a counterpoint way, in the exhibition we encounter other two sections: one of
the Romanian landscape, in which we feel at home, and the other, of the portraits, the works from this last section showing us a master painter, one that endows his portraits with the gift of communicating with us, the onlookers...
Indisputably, Cristache Gheorghiu is one of the representative painters of Brasov.
Ioan Popa - Gazeta de Transilvania, februarie 1997
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