The Sacred. Old and New

Works exhibited in the Kunst aus Rumänien project at Kunsteverein Mistelbach, Austria, 2012

In the troubled contemporary artistic context, the sacred appears as a positive alternative to the concerns of our age, constituting a complex and relevant notion of the spirituality of the 21st century.

Being considered a fundamental value of human existence, along with good, beauty and truth, the sacred represents an essential and existential landmark in the discovery of the forms of the spiritual world, revealing the various aspects of transcendence. The involvement of researchers in the definition of the sacred highlights the importance given today to this notion, also revealing its extraordinary plurality of meanings of a psychological, sociological, philosophical, religious and artistic nature.

The notion of the sacred has found many equivalent expressions in ancient cultures, its meanings referring to the idea of ​​detachment from the world of the profane and separation from the plane of ordinary or ordinary existence. Since ancient times, the sacred indicated the divine nature and its brilliance, the supernatural and the presence of powers superior to human ones, marking a form of distancing of the things and beings put at the service of the divinity from everything that was impure.

In this context of definitions, the current term from the Romanian language, sacred, derived from the Latin sacer, also signifies that which is holy, solemn, with a religious character, inspiring feelings of veneration and exaltation. In the same way, in the French language, the meanings of the notion of sacred reflect absolute respect, by designating everything that belongs to a separate, forbidden and inviolable domain, opposed to the profane, making it the object of an intense feeling of religious reverence. In turn, the English language gives meanings similar to this notion, referring to everything that is consecrated, respected, specific to the divinity, “set aside” or dedicated to religious purposes.

Starting from these considerations, the present work reflects the fruit of our work of research and artistic creation in the direction of discovering the values ​​and forms of manifestation and representation of the sacred through the visual medium. The following pages therefore sum up our concern to express in visual form what the famous Spanish theoretician Juan Plazaola defined by the expression of the artistic sacred, a suggestive formula of man’s permanent desire to transpose into visible, concrete forms, the infinite world of the invisible

(text by Adrian & Irina-Andreea Stoleriu, Iasi, 2020)