Black still life (1976)

He became deaf and mute as a child due to meningitis, and his mother taught him to speak again. Roman started at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts in 1921 as a student of István Réti, but finished only in 1928, because in the meantime he attended the Heyman School of Fine Arts in Munich in 1922-23. In 1924 he visited Nagybánya and in the same year he had his first solo exhibition, with great professional success. In the early 1930s, he went on study trips to Berlin, Paris and Vienna. In these places, he supported himself as a professional boxer so that he could draw at will. In 1932, he and his father, William Roman, started a chocolate-drausel manufacturing business in Shanghai. Due to the constantly humid climate conditions, their stocks were ruined and bankruptcy caused his father to return home, but he did not come home until 1937, when his mother became ill. Time spent in the Far East is a recurring motif in both his writing and painting.

In 1942 he exhibited his dramatic paintings with the Socialist Artists, but the exhibition was closed by the police. His career as a painter began with this fiasco. In 1943, he had an exhibition at the House of Artists, on which his uncle, Arthur Elek, wrote a review. Elek committed suicide in 1944 because of the Jewish laws that came into force. From this time on, Román also hid in the Pásztó area, because he was called up for labour service, and then survived the siege in Buda. His literary work developed after 1945, with seven volumes (novels and short stories) and regular publication in journals. In 1958, a solo exhibition of his works was held in the Chamber Hall of the Kunsthalle and in 1967 in the Adolf Fényes Hall.

György Román's world is also close to fairy tales, children's painting and naïve painting. At the same time, as his monographer Mariann Kolozsváry writes: "His artistic world is so self-evident, so self-contained, that it cannot be placed in any art historical category." Román's visions are layered, his colours are concentrated, the paint is thickly applied to the ground. In Black Still Life, he paints his favourite subject, a floral still life (in the middle of a table, sometimes in an open window), often interpreted as a hidden self-portrait. Unlike his early paintings, here he deliberately avoids three-dimensionality, the plasticity of the forms being given more by the greasy texture of the paint. Roman's painterly expression is crowded, even when he depicts only a table and a vase of flowers. The tension is heightened by the fact that the vase is set on the edge of the table (with its top view of the leaf), as if it could slip off at any moment.