In 1994, Ștefan Câlția made the work "Restoration" as a way of telling about the risk of restoring the instincts and behaviors of the communist era, of establishing neo-communism, a totalitarian regime that gives birth to another, a different, but essentially harmful one. Bouquets of flowers in glass cups, travellers, tools and gabled houses, already for two decades populated his imagination haunted by the monsters of the political concrete in search of restoration of the lost time. Gestures, things, layers of that time are memories that built the attitude he has developed in art and which we now suggest in the exhibition, in an attempt to define the restoration as the artist brings it about.

The care that he passes on through painting and concrete actions is intertwined in an attitude that sees art as integrated into everyday life. This relationship between the imaginary and the practical, leads to and stimulates a chain of initiatives today, of houses cared for by a community in formation. Now, the Monumentum Association is restoring the facades of the houses in Șona, in a programme dedicated to architecture and space.

Heritage restoration also consists of gestures and actions related to education. The recovery of a smithy from the village of Apața, relocated to the village of Șona and rechristened "Lazarus' smithy", a concrete thing, carried out together with the villagers as an assumed exercise of reviving some social ties, in analogy with the resurrected Lazarus. A blacksmith needs an anvil and a hammer, the rest of the tools, dozens or maybe hundreds, and he can make them himself in the forge according to his needs, the artist tells some visitors of the forge, emphasizing the ideas of craft and craftsmanship.

In the art of the last hundred years and with the ready-made discourse, through decontextualization the aesthetics of vernacular forms has become a common place. However, the way we can reintegrate the rhythm of the blacksmith's work and the attitude he has towards tools in our world today is a challenge that the artist wants to talk about.

We also include in the exhibition some other related ideas, such as the preservation and display of uncle Lazar's drawing of the sheepskin coat, of the hunting horn that reminds the artist of the restorer of wind instruments he knew during high school, in Timișoara, of the pottery that generated, starting in 2021, a project to restore objects in the style and technique of the old Transylvanian pottery, or the fragment of a roadside crucifix with Jesus Christ recovered from a church in Bistriţa Năsăud. The space built and this universe of things are placed in a natural one, as it appears in the landscapes of Ștefan Câlția studied by the researcher Tibor Hartel. This space is defined as cultural-agricultural landscapes, i.e. those natural landscapes in which man has an essential role through the way they work and coexist with the ecosystem in a sustainable way, understanding the roles of each element in this territory.

Curators, Alexandra Manole and Matei Câlţia