Restauration 1994

Curator: The atmosphere in Stefan Caltia's 1994 oil painting "Restauration" immediately strikes me as unsettling—there’s something in the colors, that hazy dark green background, and the composition itself that makes me feel slightly on edge. How does it strike you? Editor: Absolutely! The term “restauration” hints at something repaired or renewed, yet what’s presented to us is far from pristine. The unsettling juxtapositions – animal figures bearing burdens and human forms bound and inert – really begs the question, “restoration” for whom? Curator: Precisely! It's a wonderfully bizarre landscape. A lizard-like creature leads, its eyes wide and perhaps worried, burdened by what seems to be a sack containing broken, porcelain-like figures. It reminds me of the odd burdens we all carry. Editor: I read that porcelain as the remnants of a colonial gaze – broken dolls and figures alluding to displaced identities, lost cultural heritages, perhaps a critical take on a failed cultural renewal after periods of oppression. Notice the palette. It's gloomy, isn't it? Suggesting an undercurrent of sadness and decay that challenges celebratory narratives about so-called "restoration" projects. Curator: Yes, a gloominess that I find very moving, actually! It hints at melancholy, definitely. But in that melancholy I feel a certain tenderness too, in the gentle painting of that monkey’s gaze on the lower right – a red clothed figure seems to witness something difficult, maybe offering solace to us all, or questioning whether this restoration will make anything truly whole again. Editor: The details certainly invite a deep thinking on those power dynamics: who restores, who is restored, and at what cost? The best surrealism always reflects an underlying truth of the human experience. Caltia presents it as fraught with these tensions between memory and healing, destruction and renewal. Curator: Absolutely! Caltia's paintings, so steeped in fable, invite a dialogue about history, memory and the bizarre theater of being human. Editor: It certainly does! Thanks to Caltia, our own process of understanding is also undergoing its own “Restauration."