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.

The distance between the colour of the water laid on a paper and the same colour dried, between the oil from the tube and the oil on canvas, or between the acrylic from the top of the brush and the one remained on canvas, is thinning, in time, within the light of continuous technical innovations, in order to lessen or even cancel the random interval, the risk degree, and finally, the distance between intention and achievement, between vision and its carrying out. Here it’s not just about convenience, but also about exigency and efficiency (important azimuths of modernity, visual arts’ space included), about finding the most suitable media for transmitting emotion with no communication alterations. Under these conditions, the appeal to the language of ceramics may seem a regression, a simulation or reviving the ancestry and, simultaneously, from a theoretical perspective, a form of archeology.

Cristina Bolborea is living this harsh and miraculous artistic experience for some decades now, with wisdom and courage, with humility and enthusiasm, in a completely personal manner, managing to transform the obstacle of the distance into priming. In a weird way, almost inexplicable, she knows how her objects will look like when they are out of the oven, knowing not only the chromatics, but also the entire geography of her glazes cracks, she does not entangle herself in paroxysmal hopes, she does not let herself being comforted by the trust in the goodwill of the god of fire. In other words, she thinks her creation in a way that allows her not to miss a single moment of control, managing also to translate, always precisely, sharply her intentions. For this reason her carpets, her cypress needles or her bookish or mythological fantasies are exactly what she wanted them to be: strips of rustling fabric, porcelain plates smelling resin, volatile spirits locked into the ceramics rough armor. In other words, she is conserving all the poetry and power of vision, despite the long chain of slaloms through mental calculations and unpredictable things which gave them a sensitive image. Places to be there: a thematic effigy of this power to foresee, to know how the future looks like, to feel the possible.

Made of a material that is cold now, her objects keep into the artistic molecule the glow of those over one thousand degrees Celsius of the oven where they were burned.

Daniel Nicolescu

Art chronicler and journalist

director of Romanian Cultural Institute – Lisbon