Graphic arts, a necessary reconsideration

The dossier of this issue of Revista ARTA is part of those which our editorial team dedicates to various visual disciplines, be they traditional or recent, with the aim to offer a concentrate but symptomatic panorama of the state of visual arts in Romania and, if possible, in our geographical neighbourhood. Although multivalent by its numerous classical techniques, graphic art seems not to have got the status it deserves, i.e. of major art, in spite of the fact that the innovations brought about by the techno-sciences and the predominance of the visual in all forms of communication should push us to reconsider it.

But this Revista ARTA dossier, coordinated by Ciprian Ciuclea, himself a multidisciplinary graphic artist, does not speak about the relation between graphic arts and advertising, mass-media or internet. It is more like a quick review of what graphic art meant for the Romanian scene before and after 1989, with its artists, exhibitions, and places that defined its territory. It is even more about what has happened with graphic arts in the last twenty years, within the present-day civilization dynamism, wherein a continuous redefinition of concepts, techniques, and problematics takes place, as well as a permanent hybridization with other forms of artistic action, and a contamination with multimedia and informational technology. All these characteristics place graphic arts under the sign of a generalized experimental mentality, which assumes uncertain, haphazard, and virtual visual formulas, an opening towards the social and the politics, as well as a post cultural condition in the attempt to vividly capture the enormous pulse of our contradictory, ever changing reality.

Magda Cârneci, Editor-in-chief