Mixed Media At Good News Café, Opening January 14

WOODBURY — On January 18, Carole Peck’s Good News Cafe will host a reception for artist Florin Ion Firimita, whose exhibit “A la recherché du temps perdu” will be on display from January 14 until March 10.

Mr Firimita is a visual artist, author, and teacher. Born and raised in Romania during the Cold War and orphaned at the age of 16, the artist survived a repressive police state, participated in the anti-Communist Revolution of December 1989 and then moved to the United States in 1990.

He began his education in the United States with an associate degree in art from Naugatuck Valley Community College and went on to earn a master of fine arts from Central Connecticut State University. In the past years, his artwork has become widely collected and requested in numerous exhibits in the US, Europe and Australia. He currently teaches art at Pomperaug High School and is an adjunct professor of art at NVCC.

The Good News Café show will be a compilation of mixed media pieces the artist created between 2004 and 2008, inspired by his interest in philosophy, music, photography, literature, film, nature, history, and personal memories (hence the title of the exhibit, inspired by Marcel Proust’s masterpiece).

In the artist’s own words: “I have been living in the United States since the summer of 1990. When I arrived here from communist Romania, I had no sense of direction, artistic or otherwise, and lived in intellectual and spiritual obscurity. I was concerned more with daily survival than aesthetics.

“I was trained as a studio painter, so most of my art until that point was quite traditional. In the beginning, I didn’t have the courage and didn’t know how to create my own vocabulary. It took me years of immersing into my new environment in order to find a sense of purpose. Then, one day, I started using collage and mixed media, incorporating family photos and letters into my paintings.

“I started looking for a new language based on my divided identity, between Europe and the United States. I realized that personal style comes mostly from having the courage and persistence of digging into your own dreams and nightmares.

“We live in an enormous, constantly changing puzzle. 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 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’s 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.”

Carole Peck’s Good News Cafe is located in the Sherman Village Plaza near the intersection of Main Street South (Route 6) and Sherman Hill Road (Route 64) in Woodbury.