It was probably inevitable for us to dedicate the special dossier of this issue of Revista ARTA to the Venice Biennale of this year. Obviously, because it is the most important event of this kind in the global visual world, but also because the theme of this 55th edition was simultaneously fascinating and intriguing. Under the title “Encyclopedic Palace”, we witnessed a selection of artists și artworks which seems to go against the general visual trend of today, marked by so much (post) conceptualism, sociologism / (eco) relationism, and a pragmatic formalism with commercial undertones.

On the contrary, what we could see in Venice this year was an inverse selection so to say: artworks and attitudes which are envisioning an impossibility – the visual image tempting an integral figuration (and trans-figuration) of the world, an Imago Mundi, the effort of certain artistic (and non artistic) brains to catch through visual forms those elements often invisible (as being subconscious or superconscious) which are structuring our coherent understanding of reality. The selection of this Venice Biennale privileged, after a long time of absence, those visual poetics that are focalized on the subtle relationship of the self with the world, the dialogue of the profound psyche with the universe: in other words, those visual discourses obsessed mostly with the “inner image”, so important for our good psychic evolution and so badly overwhelmed by the huge diluvium of external images in which we are living.

Artistic as much as anthropologic, spiritual as much as ethnographic, poetic and scientific, “passeist” and futurist, imaginative and visionary, The Venice Biennale of 2013 has meant a challenge for our recent visual habits. The special dossier of this issue of Revista ARTA – coordinated by Diana Marincu and Anca Mihuleț – has addressed this challenge in texts signed by contributors from Romania and abroad, who take into discussion also several national pavilions, among which the Romanian one which was very successful.

Magda Carneci, Editor-in-chief