A museum of comparative art is a space of legitimacy, evidence of communication, of time, that does not make mistakes in selection, of the fact that from all the human experience, what is available remains somewhere. Even though we can not always explain the sense of correspondence, the eye shows us that very different things can stay together, that utilitarian objects, stylized for centuries, enter in direct dialog with the contemporary artistic object. There is a spirit of the place, of the links and correspondences; in such a museum we can notice that, in this ample "amalgam" of creating, in different steps, things have a reason.
Viewing from the outside and analyzing the results in “cold”, the experience from here is profitable for everyone. THE COMPARATIVE ART MUSEUM from Sangeorz-Bai is a convincing reality. A new building, proper to requirements, but perfectly integrating to the architecture of the area, the museum is a cultural complex. Except the traditional and contemporary artistic patrimony it disposes of an entire system of documentation and research, a library, restitution workshops and accommodation spaces for artists. It is an institution that has proposed it’s self to live in the middle of the events, to benefit of the facilities of the communication techniques, applying the principle through which it does not matter where you live, but, the way in which you conceive yourself. "Center or edge" is a statute which each person assumes us and which's dilemma, here in Sangeorz-Bai, does not exist. The inborn under which the dialog between cultures is placed, between generations, between different personalities reflect very well in this museum.
This would be a short history of a patrimony, of a new cultural institution surprising through the quality, but mostly through the fact that it was born in a period not very favorable to the investment in this sector. All that happened here seems incredible, the tenacity and will of putting the past and the present in a constructive dialogue, in a space in which the nature specific to the area was the central nucleus of development. The way in which people understood this "partnership" is observed now, in the tradition tight to utilization and use of wood in various ways, with deep meanings for its beauty and expressive qualities, and the challenge made to modernity is of letting sights to discover, with the 3rd millennium human eyes, what can still be seen, the way in which things have to continue, to consist, not to have the retention in cultivating, not in the sense of parody, a cultural experience that resisted in time.
After the exercise of fifteen organized symposiums, with a program that created a welcomed breakthrough in the usual quotidian and brought the “fresh air” of contemporary artistic thinking, now, an extraordinary thing took contour: THE COMPARATIVE ART MUSEUM. What practically meant its creation is hard to recount, and it would be better to skip the obstacles. At the moment the museum benefits of a special made building, of a collection of over 1000 traditional art objects, of modern Romanian art, but also foreign art. I spoke to the one that was the soul of these surprising incidents for the era we live in, Maxim Dumitras and I understood that this place is thought not as an isolated space, that conserves extinctive objects, but it is structured as an active space, strongly anchored in modernity.
From the building’s modernity to the expositional conception, to the last hour endowment for information methods and communication, all this convinces us in a real way that the place does not matter, the wish to contact the world does. The experience becomes fascinating when you can keep the balance between what you are as an existential mould, when you fructify a tradition with a large opening potential, you discover the germs of modernity, and the modern artist becomes the thinker between what it was and today’s world. Here in THE COMPARATIVE ART MUSEUM from Sangeorz-Bai communication is a real thing, and the success of this project has a great love at its base, knowledge and understanding for the past and present, for here and what is happening in the rest of the world.