She was born in Czechoslovakia and raised in Hungary. In manners and accent there are traces of her European background. Her eyes are bright, with a sometimes impish glint. She is small, almost childlike in stature, and looks younger than her years. “Voila!”Įven in person, Cellini seems to fool the eye. There is a sense of a surprise unveiling, as in a magic act. She frames her subjects with drapery that function like theatrical curtains.
The backgrounds are almost always dark, often black. She composes her canvases like stage sets. When she paints a crystal goblet, it’s a flawless illusion-the facets and reflections within the glass are all there. She paints with the meticulous attention to detail of the old masters. With Cellini, the realism has a particularly elegant pedigree. Were its strange subjects not painted so realistically-think Salvadore Dali’s melting clocks or René Magritte’s floating men in bowler hats-its effects would not be so startling. Surrealism has always been radical in content and conservative in rendering. There she conjures up dark and quirky impossibilities -a monkey in armor, an orchid sprouting from an industrial pipe, a giant lightbulb on a forest floor.
This is the riddle-and wonder-of Eva Cellini, a North Jersey artist who, in her 10th decade, still climbs a steep staircase to her garret studio every day. What then to make of a 90-year-old surrealist? Not only that, but one who didn’t even take up the style until age 54? The embrace of the nonrational, the prankishness, the fascination with the minutiae of one’s own dreams-all bespeak a young sensibility. There’s always been a youthful spirit to surrealism. An artist taps into the unconscious, explores uncertainty.
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