AnnArt Gallery invites you Thursday 12th of November at 6:30 pm at the opening for the show Gardens for Dinu Pillat by Ştefan Cȃlţia; it can be viewed up to the 30th of December 2015.

“Flicking through a poetry book by Rainer Maria Rilke, Ştefan Cȃlţia spiritually encountered Dinu Pillat, the intellectual with a broken destiny that translated the poems in Romanian. After closing the book and stepping into his garden, taking a stroll on the alley down to his studio, he realized that he could symbolically comfort one of the latter’s unfulfilled wishes – one which he expressed after he got out of communist prison and mentioned it in the preface signed by Ileana Mălăncioiu -, that of working as a caretake for a public garden.

Imagined while his mind was on Dinu Pillat as “gifts” for him, the sketched and painted gardens by Ştefan Cȃlţia from 2012-2013 are grouped into two sub-series which form a nucleus that prompted the artist’s third solo show at AnnArt Gallery. The six oil paintings exhibited in the second room of the gallery space are, from an iconographic point of view, singular in Ştefan Cȃlţia’s recent oeuvre: landscapes in a literal sense, with the absence of the recurring motifs of his imaginarium, such as travelers walking distances, floating, with their eyes emptied from too much melancholy. They have been replaced with what a connoisseur of Ştefan Cȃlţia’s art might perceive as a tensed iconographic emptiness, marked in some of this sub-series’ works through a beam of light which centrally cuts the image, like a unique compositional “happening” of ambiguous nature: both chromatically as well as narratively. 

The second series subsumed to the theme of gardens for Dinu Pillat, composed of 16 sketches, is a continuation of an older preoccupation for those textures similar to filigrees of vegetal or bestiary motifs, as well as symbolic motifs with a preponderant Christian quality. The same artistic interest can be found in the five tracing paper sketches from the series Sketches for Herina, mounted in the alveola formed facing the window in the first room of the exhibition space. Initially thought of as fitting for exhibiting in the nave of the famous medieval Romanic church of Bistriţa-Năsăud, they are recontextualized at Annart Gallery with a double purpose: to lay the sacrifice of Dinu Pillat and his family – as he himself did – under the sign of Christianity and to open the gallery space towards his own garden through the semi-transparency of the tracing paper covered with sketches, bathed in the light from the big window.”

Patricia Bădulescu, curator

The entire body of works is available for sale via AnnArt Gallery. For more details and counselingplease contact: office@annartgallery.ro