The International Sculpture Symposium of Sângeorz-Bai

The phenomenon of the sculpture symposiums already admitted

into artistic practice since 1970 in our country" when took place

the first symposium of Magura (Buzau district), isan opportunity -

everybody knows it - for a more dynamic connection of the artist

with the nature, with the public and the last but not the least, among the artists themselves.

There is given now to the town of Sângeorz-Bai, a generous

space itself for spiritual meetings and quiet collectedness in the

dialogue with this magnificent receptacle, which is such a varied

region of mountains and hills, to become, after numerous and

remarkable participations of the Romanian sculptors abroad, the

first international sculpture symposium in Romania, in the true

sense of the word.

Providing an admirable energy, the sculptor Maxim Dumitras succeeded in gathering up 14 artists, among them 10 coming from

foreign countries, and to inspire aII with something of the peculiar

"genius" of these places, their fascination hard to define and to

carry out -quite marvellous- this project designated togo on.

Mainly dedicated to wood, and wood carving, this ancestral material,

with an apart sensibility, in the Romanian art and not-only

there, constituting in a certain way the ideal element, the nucleus

of the confluence of many related cultures, this symposium differs

somehow of the others - thematic or which had as a purpose the

integration of natural formations - as far as the works resulted

from,. will enrich the patrimony of the Museum of contemporary

art of Sângeorz-Bai, conceived just in the meaning of the reflection

of the secret communications among cultures, among tt1e

primeval and the modern stratums of civilizations.

Of course, each artist has invested here his own stylistic equation

but however it seems that it happened imperceptibly an undeniable

action: they have learned, at the game time as the hardened

creative work of their own artefactum to see simultaneously through the eye of the other, that is to say, to understand to be different. It is, in our opinion, the suprema lesson and the happy accomplishment of this meeting.

Gheorghe Vida