gravură - Universitatea Naţională de Arte

and tactile seductions. As such, we have to consider the irrefutableimportance of the materiality of a work of art.This constitutes the topic of the study here presented.Together with a great number of practicing artists, we continue tobelieve in the esthetic and expressive virtues of a work of art, qualitiesthat derive from the concept of materiality. Even when we take intoaccount different tendencies in such contemporary art forms, inwhich the computer is used, and in which the real is reconstructedas virtual reality and the message of the work is reconstructed invisual media, the topic of materiality is relevant still. This comes asa consequence of our need to appreciate the quality of the referentin plastic form that tries to capture and represent reality on onehand, and on the other, the study of the great value of a work of artas a physical, concrete construct is in itself a noble reevaluation.We are taking then, about the esthetic appreciation not only interms of the message conveyed, but also from the point of viewof the medium which makes its creation possible; in terms of theart of printmaking, for example, we can talk about the beauty ofthe printed (engraved) traces, of the quality of the black and graycolors, and of the seduction of the paper on which such traces aremade, and which in turn draw our attention back to them. On theother hand, we cannot set aside the history of the first millennia,which shows us that the topics of figuration take as a subject theevocation of a visible motif, be it grass, water, wood, rock, orCOAPSA. Even if we don’t accept such observations as: the history offiguration can be summarized as the “history of gradual discoveryof appearances” as Roger Fry proposes referring to the subject of204Florin STOICIU