Silk Road

Artist Statement

SILK ROAD is my latest work. It was conceived and realized specifically to be brought to Venice at this time, and it is the sequel to a previous exhibition held in September 2007 at the Franciscan Monastery in Piran, Slovenia.

This work connects my present art practice to my beginnings, it unifies all my experiences - as an artist, as a person. It refers to the various stages and paths of my life. It is a response to the always-actual theme of 'East meets West' and the exchanges between different worlds, races, religions, and societies, immersed and interwoven in the everyday of our contemporary globalized existence.

Venice is also the place from which Marco Polo embarked many centuries ago onto his long eastward journey, out of intellectual curiosity and thirst for discoveries, new materials, histories, traditions, landscapes, botanics, crafts, all the while enhancing and stimulating trade and economic progress in both worlds... SILK ROAD is the sincerest expression of my own accumulated experience, from the time I began working with clay in 1967 in my hometown of northern Transylvania, and throughout an exciting professional itinerary of 16 years in the former Yugoslavia and now another 16 years of living and working in Singapore.

What I wish to address is the idea of uninterrupted exchange, from the perspective of the spiritual and emotional dimension of that magnificent journey, epitomized by such a splendid and adventurous 14th century personality.

Interwoven in this material are my precious memories of train travels long ago, the evocation of another country that does not exist anymore... and the opening up of the window of imagination to distant, mysterious, fantastic new territories.

My artwork today is structured by the very same parameters and values that inspired my 1982 exhibition at Capodistria's Meduza Gallery: beyond the ceramic process itself, it is the search for simple shapes, perpetual motion, gradual transformation, growth, multiplication, development. The extraordinary beauty of fired glazes and ornaments is subordinated to their function and raw materiality. Narrativity and anecdote give way to the simple, quiet and evocative shape. Imagination unfolds like smooth silk and the gentle, tactile surface of the infinite allegorical landscape.