The road from Făgăraş to Şona, modernized some time ago, goes along the Olt river. It is an ancient river, lauded by forebearers, painted, and written in verse by contemporaries, and it is beyond a life resource since it divides two worlds. It is a natural boundary between the huge and picturesque Oltenia and Transylvania with its imperial scents, regulated and formalized along the centuries, and so confuse nowadays.
The mirror-water becomes a kind of border between the South and the North of the country. It is a stream of water going across the heart of Romania. But is also a border between the sky and the earth.
When I reached Şora, I could not help noticing the intense blue of the house of the Câlția family. That blue was in fact the shade of the sky above my head. From a certain perspective, I could see the entire façade with the gate itself seemed like a cutout leading me towards the immensity of the firmament.
Then I saw the rest of the village, at ease, one step at the time, after which I admired the house of a deceased aunt, a house moved from the village Ucea here, in the garden of the old house, the family house of Ștefan Câlția; both houses were dressed in the saturated, darker blue.
It is the color which affirms what we can call conventionally the rural Transylvanian quality of Romanians – the distinct mark on an organized and inhabited territory, organically merged into the natural diversity which is impossible to compete with.
“How can one not paint the house in blue, how can one not?” is a question Ștefan Câlția asked himself in a cinematic essay, “The Blue Left Among Us,” produced by Diana Iabraşu. It was launched on May 10, 2020. From the same film we find out that the first blue, the most profound, is the blue in the eyes of the artist’s grandmother, Eudochia. The godmother of the village. This blue of the house, melded in the immensity of the green and of the chromatic diversity of flowers “gained a precious dimension, like a gem, a brightness – a bride in the garden” like Ștefan Câlția stated. (Vladimir Bulat, curator)
