31. Fish with Village [1996]

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Head of the Romanian Postmodern & Contemporary Art Evaluation Office

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31. Fish with Village [1996]

Ştefan Câlţia

1942, Braşov

Estimate:

EUR 20.000 - 30.000

Sold

EUR 42.000

References

Steluța Pestrea Suciu, "Interview with the painter Stefan Câltia", in Astra Magazine, no. 3-4, 2016.

ulei pe pânză, 100 x 118 cm, signed bottom left, in red, monogrammed "Câlția"; titled and dated on verso, in green, "Fish with village, 1996"; noted bottom right, in red, "finished on the first day of the Ciorbea government"

Ștefan Câlția is one of the most avid representatives of the indigenous magic realism. In his works, the artist skillfully combines the fantastic and the mundane, the ordinary and the extraordinary, the real and the unreal. Situated at the intersection with surrealism, this current draws its lifeblood from the Northern Renaissance. Ștefan Câlția creates genuine pictorial poems using a particular grammar of plastic signs. The favorite theme of his works – the journey, is illustrated differently each time. The moments that the artist spends in nature can be deciphered as true initiatory journeys. He identifies two possible ways to decipher the journey. In the denotative sense, Câlția identifies a horizontal route, where the landscape gradually gets lost. In the connotative sense, which he will also adopt and employ in his work, the artist refers to what he calls "the real journey", where the character floats and rises above the earthly plane, covering a much broader horizon of knowledge. He thus assumes also coding another motif in his creation - the flight. Ștefan Câlția sketches portraits of travelers heading hypnotized towards an uncertain destination. He is inspired by the stories constructed by Pieter Bruegel and the complex compositions of Hieronymus Bosch, and establishes, through drawing, the silences of his protagonists. This time, however, the features of the protagonist lose any connection with humanity and are transposed under the silhouette of a creature with symbolic loads. In some cultures, the fish was given the title of messenger of the spirit world. With a symbolism that resides in fertility, abundance or luck, Ștefan Câlția's fish gently rises from the earth and soars towards the high sky, carrying on its "shoulders" the weight of the ancestral village. Becoming a leitmotif, the artist's blue house makes its presence known again, being presented through a strategic multiplication and stringing of the remarkable architectural construction. The fish becomes a guide of the secular traditions towards an uncertain topos, and so the resulting construction levitates at sunset, above the reddish sky, leaving the barren nature behind.

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