Bukovina Blue / Roland Pangrati

There are places that can be described and places that must be traversed internally. Bukovina belongs to the second category. In the BUKOVINA BLUE series, Roland Pangrati does not propose a simple return to the landscape, but a reconfiguration of it as a space of cultural memory, historical sedimentation and emotion filtered through time.

The choice of Bukovina is at the same time symbolic and pictorial. The region is not only famous for its spectacular relief, for the verticality of the Lady Stones or for the mineral texture of the rock, but also for its identity complexity: a territory of cultural interferences, of overlapping traditions, of spirituality visible in architecture and mural painting. Bukovina becomes, in this context, not just a place, but an archetype of coexistence and cultural fertility. The “Bukovina Blue” series builds a bridge between these layers. On the one hand, the works capture recognizable landscapes – especially the silhouette of the Lady Stones –, on the other hand, they descend in detail, in fragment, into the intimate structure of matter. This alternation between the panoramic and the microscopic destabilizes the classical convention of the landscape: we are no longer faced with a conventional space of contemplation, but a space of in-depth exploration.

The unity of the series is not given only by the subject, but by the radical technical option. Pangrati resorts to the Japanese Nihonga technique, using natural mineral pigments applied to paper, in a process that privileges the slow sedimentation of color and a direct relationship with materiality. This choice creates a subtle dialogue between the Orient and the Eastern European space, between a pictorial tradition of refinement and a landscape charged with history and spirituality.

The azure blue becomes the conceptual core of the exhibition. More than a chromatic option, it functions as a historical bridge: the pigment used by the craftsmen who painted the frescoes of the monasteries in northern Moldova five or six centuries ago is reactivated here in a contemporary context. BUKOVINA BLUE thus becomes a material memory, a continuity of the artistic gesture over time. Azurite carries within itself the idea of ​​sacredness, transcendence, but also resistance – it is an extremely persistent pigment.

In Pangrati’s works, blue does not only describe the sky or the shadow of the rock; it structures the space, spiritualizes it, abstracts it. The landscape is reduced to its essence, and the form is subjected to a purification that brings the image closer to a territory of meditation. Thus, the works transgress the genre of the landscape as a naturalistic representation and transforms it into a field of reflection on permanence and fragility.

The mineral detail becomes almost autonomous, detached from the context, transforming into a topography of memory. The rock is no longer just a geological element, but a silent witness of history and culture. Texture, fissure, stratification become metaphors of time.

The exhibition thus proposes a double movement: a return to the landscape and, simultaneously, an overcoming of it. Bukovina is not represented as a tourist image or as regional nostalgia, but as a space of convergence – between cultures, between techniques, between eras. Nihonga and azurite, paper and mountain, tradition and contemporaneity meet in an unusual, but all the more fascinating, balance.

BUKOVINA BLUE is, in essence, a meditation on continuity, on how a pigment can cross centuries, a technique can travel between continents, and a landscape can become an inner language. Roland Pangrati does not paint Bukovina; he translates it into a register of essence, in which color becomes memory, and memory becomes form.

Cristina Simion, curator