Still life | Vasile Movileanu

Still life is a genre of painting emerged in the XVI and XVII century in the Netherlands. Still life is made up of some inanimate objects. The first still life paintings were called in Dutch “stilleben”. Compared with the portrait in which is present only human figure or landscape that render nature or architecture, still life can be composed of several objects in the environment. The imagination about static nature is usually related to the gifts of nature that represent wealth which is conveyed by Flemish painters.

From all of the potential objects that form a still life Vasile Movileanu more often chose flowers that are closer to nature. The flowers that he was putting on the table after cleaning the house when parents were away at work in the field and he was left home alone. In the artist’s paintings we will find roses, peonies, narcissus, cornflowers, snowdrops, lilac flowers, sunflower, room flowers, but most often we meet in his still life paintings the calla lily…
You will notice that the artist is in love with the “Calla lilies”, especially the white ones that charm you through their immaculate whiteness and their simplicity. Calla is native to South Africa, it is a flower with a seemingly simple, but very elegant petal.

After watching these still lifes, we note that they oftentimes go beyond the borders of the genre because they stay in connection with the landscape and the indoors, in which the world of objects remains the center of attention only as long as it serves the purpose of the author, so that in the end, it can create a certain „atmosphere”, more often than not connected to the hidden presence of humanity.
Still life in the interpretation of the artist is not some sort of Sezanist end in itself, longing in the area of „spherical composition”, but it is regarded as part of the world which allows interweaving to happen between different kinds of beauty like landscape and indoor. In these works, the surrounding world is regarded by the author through the abundance of detail which seem too clear and explicit at first sight, and which bear within them a certain amount of narration, but everything arranges itself logically in the context of his „full-of-vitality” thinking, with renewed interest in all earthly matters and the materialistic meaning he gives to ordinary everyday objects.