I think the moment has come for Revista ARTA to dedicate a consistent thematic file to one of the most dynamic arts in the present-day Romanian visual world. Ceramics has been for some time now in an alert process of demarginalization, of leaving behind its traditional retirement and discretion to get in the middle of today’s formal battles. There is nowadays a more and more offensive and wide-spread consciousness that the decorative can represent, in all its forms of expression, a major artistic exercise, a visual research as complex, elaborate and open towards superior senses as any other modality of practicing the artistic impulse.

From the traditional pole to the avangardist one, new practical procedures have explosively dynamized this ancient art of fire: digital technologies, mixed-media, multimedia, 3D printing, but also “author’s techniques” invented by the artists themselves for new materials and chemical processes. All this confers to the domain of ceramics an active experimental dimension, extremely diversified and personalized.

The freedom to try everything, interdisciplinarity, the transfer between artistic techniques and visual currents be they modern or postmodern, have explosively marked this art of the clay, sandstone, and porcelain. In its field one can notice nowadays the existence of such tendencies as conceptual or historicist ceramics, installation and sculptural ceramics, experimentalist and cultural quotation ceramics etc, combined in the most diverse and inventive manners. The present-day impetuosity of ceramics is proved as well by the fact that it is practiced – as an art of interior or as an art of public spaces, with assumed social dimensions – by more and more artists coming from unexpected domains of action.

The current emancipation of ceramics at an international level – evident in the number of biennials and big exhibitions, in specialized art magazines and art fairs, but also in the global professional community sustained by blogs and social networks on internet – this emancipation is equally obvious at our local level. The special file of this issue of Revista ARTA wants to demonstrate that Romanian ceramists have now a more intense consciousness of their possibilities of a major creation and cultural recognition and that Romanian ceramics can and wants to play a more visible role in our society.

Magda Cârneci, Editor-in-chief