18. Circus Characters [1991]

In Stefan Câlția's view, any artwork is based on a very clear geometry. Even the figurative can be methodically broken down into several distinct elements. A painter of silences, the artist bets especially in compositions with multiple characters, on the spatiality and distances that are installed between them. In the economy of his creation, the character acquires an essential role. But for Câlția, the character should not only be interpreted through the lens of decoding a human silhouette, but could embody a cloud, a tree, a bird, or even the background of the work. His female models, often depicted with a bouquet of flowers in hand, are inspired by rural women, whom the artist would meet as they left church. The registration of the event as an important one was marked by the wearing of "Sunday" clothes, specially preserved for this moment. In canvases dedicated to flight or travel, Stefan Câlția presents himself as a visual narrator, while in works that present the world as a theater, the artist takes on a dual role: that of scenographer and playwright. Naturally, the grammar of his plastic signs converge towards specific moods. Starting from the idea that "we are actors of this world", Stefan Câlția opens the cycle dedicated to the show in his works. The world of spectacle in his creation initially appears in the form of the carnivalesque. The artist adopts the moralizing sense of the proposed characters, illustrates the fascinating world of the circus, and presents an inside-out world. He shapes his repertoire from immediate reality and from his direct contact with divinity. He creates certain typologies that become leitmotifs of his work, regardless of the chosen theme: the woman with flowers, the traveler, the bird - understood both as decoration and as a way of connecting with the heavenly environment. He presents the background as a perpetual motion and an infinite ancestral space. In the transition from backstage to curtain of the characters, the artist demonstrates his mastery in illustrating magic realism, by coding symbols in a playful manner. The artist's proposed semiotics's ambivalence is revealed to us in simple motifs, which have become a leitmotif.

References

GUȚĂ, Adrian; PAVEL, Amelia, "Ștefan Câlția", Possible Gallery, Bucharest, 2004. "Stories with Stefan Câlția", UNArte Publishing House, Bucharest, 2013.

Dimensions

width 50 cm, height 56 cm

Description

oil on cardboard, signed and dated lower left, in red, in monogram, "Câlția, 1991"

Dating

1991

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