40. Vase with flowers [1992]

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Head of the Romanian Postmodern & Contemporary Art Evaluation Office

0736 381 153 [email protected]

40. Vase with flowers [1992]

Ştefan Câlţia

1942, Braşov

Estimate:

EUR 3.000 - 5.000

Sold

EUR 17.500

References

GUȚĂ, Adrian; PAVEL, Amelia, "Ștefan Câlția", Possible Gallery, Bucharest, 2004. "Stories with Ștefan Câlția", UNArte Publishing House, Bucharest, 2013. Steluța Pestrea Suciu, "Interview with the painter Ștefan Câlția", in Astra Magazine, no. 3-4, 2016.

oil on canvas, 56 x 50 cm, signed and dated centrally, in red, in monogram, "Câlția, 1992"

Stefan Câlția tells stories with signs, lines, and shapes, creating a perfect literature of ink on paper. The grammar the artist uses is closely related to visual signs. He sometimes creates in black and white, highlighting ink and charcoal. He works meticulously and establishes very clear geometry. In Câlția's work, even figurative painting can be broken down into several elements. He takes fragments from other people's stories and transposes them into pretexts for image and color. A painter of silences, the artist focuses in particular on spatiality and the distances that are established between characters in his compositions. In the economy of his creation, the character plays an essential role. But in Câlția's work, the character should not be interpreted only through the prism of decoding a human silhouette, but can embody a cloud, a tree, a bird, or even the background of the work. The artist presents the background as a perpetuum mobile and an infinite ancestral space on which he fixes a protagonist (regardless of its origin) and builds the rest of the composition around these two elements. In his work, the central motif is constituted by the vessel with flowers, a motif that we often encounter throughout his work. Especially in the works made in the '80s or in the '90s, Stefan Câlția sharpens his brush on canvases with dried flowers, wildflowers, daisies, or poppies. He opts for a vibrant chromatic and predominantly uses shades of green or red. His flowers draw their sap from the striking color of the background, they are charged with the lively color of the vessel in which they reside and rise triumphantly outside it. Whether they become the protagonists of the work, or whether they share the canvas with ceramic vases or fruits, Stefan Câlția's floral elegies refer to the primordial village, the simplicity of rural life, and the endless meadows that delight with their beauty. The pictorial genre that Stefan Câlția approaches falls into the realist-fantastic area, so the artist assumes the function of a storyteller in images and gives his painting a narrative function, regardless of the subject approached.

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