Hanging Gardens. The Story of a Painting by Alin Gheorghiu
From the painter’s first major exhibition to the technique inspired by the Romanian glass icon, from Madonna to Hanging Gardens, and then to the late dialogue with Arcimboldo.
A painting and the memory of an encounter
The story of the painting that Zoe Dumitrescu-Bușulenga immediately recognized as belonging to the Madonna lineage actually begins long before the Roman evening when she saw it in our home. It begins in 1979, at Alin Gheorghiu’s first major exhibition at the Art Museum, in the Royal Palace, where I met the painter at an important moment in his creative life.
The Roman episode with Zozi cannot be understood without following this small genealogy of the painting: the encounter with Alin, the first drawing I bought from him, the visit to his studio on Pangratti Street, his explanation of the technique inspired by the glass icon, the passage from Madonna to Hanging Gardens, and, later, the opening toward Arcimboldo.
The 1979 exhibition and the charcoal rose
In 1979, Alin Gheorghiu still drew and painted recognizably, but in an already personal style: broad forms, large brushstrokes, vibrant colours, and a deliberate avoidance of unnecessary detail. It was not descriptive realism, but an intensified representation, in which the object seemed to be pushed toward the condition of a sign.
At that important exhibition at the Art Museum, held in the Royal Palace, I bought a large charcoal rose, plainly tragic in tone. The drawing was placed right at the entrance to the exhibition and was desired by other visitors as well. The fact that our wives knew each other made it possible for me to buy it. For me, that rose has remained connected with the beginning of my relationship with Alin’s painting.
In the studio on Pangratti Street
The painting that Zoe would later see in our home was an oil of approximately 80 × 60 cm, bought after my departure for Italy. During one of my returns to Bucharest, I made time to visit Alin in his studio on Pangratti Street. We talked, I watched him work, and I observed his method.
Almost every painting first had a sketch, the size of an A4 sheet or even smaller. These sketches were hung around the easel and served him as models. Alin had already moved toward a complex form of abstraction. The colours continued to vibrate, but the drawing had become denser, more layered, harder to reduce to a single subject.
In place of direct representation there appeared a composition of signs, textures and fragments, in which objects seemed to hide inside one another. It was no longer only a matter of what the painting represented, but of the way in which the layers called to one another, interrupted one another and partly covered one another.
The glass-icon technique and the birth of the “Hanging Gardens”
Alin explained to me then that one of the sources of his new technique was the religious painting on glass made by Romanian peasant painters. In glass painting, the order of execution is the reverse of classical painting: the elements closest to the viewer are drawn first, while the background is added only at the end. The image is therefore constructed from the surface toward depth, in an order that overturns the usual logic of painting on canvas.
Alin did not copy this technique; he simulated and transformed it. He created layered paintings, in which each layer had its own semantics, its own texture and its own tension. The upper layers interrupted or partly covered the lower ones, and from this superimposition the depth of the image emerged.
The first works constructed in this way were given the title Madonna, which clearly shows their connection with the imaginary world of the icon. Later, when the same technique was extended to other subjects, Alin began to call them Hanging Gardens. The title did not cancel the religious origin of the composition, but displaced it toward a broader world, in which forms, objects and signs coexist in a suspended space.
Zozi and the “Madonna” lineage
When Zoe Dumitrescu-Bușulenga saw the painting in our home, her reaction was immediate. I was trying to explain the origin of the work and was telling her the title under which I had bought it, Hanging Gardens. She abruptly interrupted me: “What hanging gardens? Can’t you see that it is the Mother of God? I told Alin that too.”
Much later I understood her reaction better. Zoe was not simply “guessing” a hidden meaning in an abstract painting. She knew, from her relationship with Alin Gheorghiu, that after his important exhibition in 1979 the painter had begun to work on a series of paintings inspired by the technique of Romanian glass icons. She probably also knew that the first such works had been titled precisely Madonna.
Therefore, when Zoe told me that the painting was the Mother of God, she was not only offering a spiritual reading of an abstract composition, but recognizing an artistic genealogy she knew directly. Beyond the later title of Hanging Gardens, she saw the internal code of the evolution of Alin’s painting.
Around Arcimboldo
Another leap in his style occurred in the vicinity of Arcimboldo. In 1993, in the Round Hall of the National Theatre, Alin Gheorghiu exhibited the cycle Around Arcimboldo. It was an exhibition in which he started from the paintings of the celebrated Mannerist painter and gradually led them from an almost perfect copy toward abstract variants. At first the source could still be recognized, but as the series advanced, the image became a new Hanging Garden.
Alin did not sell anything from that exhibition. As far as I understood, he later donated the entire group to the National Library, precisely because the works formed a whole and were not meant to be separated. I regret that, although I visited the exhibition, I did not take photographs then.
The final period
From this encounter with Arcimboldo came the paintings of his final period. Objects of the most diverse kinds — a crayfish tail, a broken egg, roots, fruits, vegetal or animal remains — mingle in a composition that preserves, deep within it, the logic of the Madonna type, even though almost nothing now points explicitly to the initial religious image.
I too have two paintings from this final period (Figs. 5, 6). They can no longer be read as a Mother of God, but they preserve the same layered construction and the same tension between object, sign and symbol. For this reason, Zoe’s observation about my older painting was not a mere intuition. It touched a real thread in Alin Gheorghiu’s creation, a thread that began with the glass icon, passed through Madonna and Hanging Gardens, and then reached, through Arcimboldo, the dense compositions of his final period.
The 2002 memorial exhibition
After Alin’s death, Anamaria organized an exhibition at the National Theatre in 2002. This time I took photographs. For me they remain not only documents of an exhibition, but also traces of a friendship and of an artistic world that was coming to an end.
In those images one can better see the final course of his painting: from the layerings inspired by the glass icon toward increasingly dense compositions, in which objects, fragments and signs gather into a construction that is difficult to name, but easy to recognize as belonging to the Gheorghiu universe.
An exhibition that never took place
After Alin’s death, in a moment of enthusiasm, perhaps even of euphoria, I tried to carry forward the idea of the connection between Arcimboldo and Gheorghiu. I wrote to the mayor of Rome, Walter Veltroni, proposing the organization of an Arcimboldo–Gheorghiu exhibition, perhaps on the occasion of an anniversary linked to the great Italian Mannerist painter. It seemed to me that such an exhibition could have brought to light a subtle relationship between a famous Italian tradition and the way in which Alin Gheorghiu had reinterpreted it, late in his career, in Romanian painting.
The letter was not merely an exhibition proposal. It was written against the difficult background of Romanian–Italian relations at that time, and it tried to show that art could become an instrument of mutual knowledge, respect, and cultural rapprochement.
Facsimile of the letter sent to the Mayor of Rome, Walter Veltroni, 24 August 2007
I received no reply. I then tried the Romanian side. Being invited, together with other Romanians from the diaspora, to Bucharest, during the Năstase government, to a meeting organized by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs at Herăstrău, I approached Mircea Geoană on this subject. I quickly understood, however, that the matter did not interest him. While I was trying to explain the idea, his phone rang and he turned his back on me so that he could speak quietly.
Quietly it was not. A few harsh words followed, which disgusted me and made me leave the gathering. Thus ended my attempt to propose an exhibition that, in my mind, was not only a tribute to Alin Gheorghiu, but also a form of affirmation of an Italo-Romanian cultural friendship.
Perhaps the idea was too personal, too late, or too poorly aligned with the institutional interests of the moment. For me, however, it remained natural. In his final period, Alin Gheorghiu had come to conduct a pictorial dialogue with Arcimboldo, and this dialogue, I believe, deserved to be seen in Italy as well.
Objects preserved at home
Besides the paintings, there has remained in my home an object from Alin Gheorghiu’s studio, made by him from an ordinary piece of wood. It does not have the breadth of his paintings, but for me it has the discreet value of a sign of friendship. I include it here as a material trace of a personal relationship with the artist.
