Critics assessments

Maria Antónia Pinto de Matos Director Museu Nacional do Azulejo [The National Tile Museum]

The Islamic memoirs that leave an indelible mark on a certain Portuguese aesthetic matrix, found in tile art one of the happiest expressions. These “polished stones,” as very expressed the name itself “al zulej”, become fundamental components in structuring the national architectures. Thanks to the illusionism that it causes, catch the materialization of space, the faience assumes in Portugal, the protagonism, as exterior decorative material reserved in other areas to the leather and textiles. The textiles that Cristina Bolborea’s works recover, exploring the plasticity of clay to compose carpets and fabrics, richly interlaced. The manner in which these objects are arranged and juxtaposed within the space of this exhibition evokes the image of Islamic fairs, those places representing the game of memories connected to childhood and youth, the miraculous space where Scheherazade’s exotic stories develop, place where the strewn soft pillows invite us stop, sit down and listen. But she is here suspended in time, petrified, in testimony snatched by an ignored Vesuvius whose incandescent lava vaporized the matter, and kept only the forms from the objects occupying the space. We still feel also the shadow of those who lived there, the time immediately before departures, in the fabrics arranged randomly on chairs or on plates, vestiges of these absent presences.

Extreme Artistic Temperature. Red Code

A hermeneutics of distances (between raw and finished, between inner and outer drawing, between the colour before and after the fire) can remind us how much ceramics has remained one of the most complex and difficult visual language of our days.

World in the Effigy

In his/her moments of skepticism and uncertainty, the artist from the space of decorative arts does all that lies in the possible to deny his/her identity. In despair, he/she loses even the minimal survival instinct, simply forgetting that the nature of own creativity is neither confused, nor replaceable. In this fragile moment when doubt and aspiration blend imperceptibly, he/she discovers new territories and gets the risky taste of desertions. And the preferred territory, especially of the ones coming from the arts of fire, but not only, is the sculpture, sometimes discreetly accompanied by the painting. Thus, tacitly, but no less radically, the glass blower becomes glass sculptor, the metal worker, a metal sculptor, the ceramist, a ceramics or porcelain sculptor etc. This bizarre temptation of migration, far away from confirming the ideals, is doing nothing but to distort and to dislocate one of the most complex and spectacular artistic codes, namely that of decorative arts.

Laying fired

In the ’70s – ’80s, the Romanian ceramic art knew of a real rivalry between two academic centers (the Bucharest Capital and the Transylvanian Cluj) and between several tiles and porcelain factories that were receiving artists with daring projects. A very original ceramist, Ioana {etran, creator of herbs, corollas and insects anatomies in thread porcelain, becoming a member of the International Academy of Ceramics in Geneva, was at the same time a teacher with the prestigious high school of art from Bucharest. After three decades, her student, Cristina, fascinated from her adolescence by the storyteller plasticity of the fired earth, became a University professor, a member of the staff of the Bucharest “Galateea” ceramics art gallery and a curator for exhibitions dedicated to the arts of fire.

Orfevrerie in ceramics

In general, the Artist is the being most fascinated by the happening. He/she loves to distraction (sometimes also beyond its limit) to rely on what we call chance. Why are we surprised? In vain, because we omit a truth: the Artist himself is the result of a crossing between enigma and random qualities that only the Good God sets it in His crucible that is located on the divine workbench in the Workshop of Human Beings.

Razvan Theodorescu Academician / Member of the Romanian Academy

When I entered the latest exhibition opened by the ceramist Cristina Bolborea under the old vaults in brick of Brancovan Palace Gheţăria [The Ice House] in Mogo[oaia, the sumptuous jewels in clay, in metal laboriously winded, in raw polychrome and brilliant glass, imagined by the fertile and cultivated artist’s fantasy, captivated my eyes as some monumental and also aerial “Birds of Paradise”.They made me remember the exquisite barbarism of nomadic adornment that I wrote something about in my far off youth, and their contemporary key delighted me.