Letter from Professor Raoul Sorban

The 19th of January 1989

A large and tormented unfolding of adventures of childbirth pains, of challenges, of development, of metamorphoses from the moment when the vision takes shape in the artist's mind and aspirations till its materialization in the form the artist has strived for.

So many elations and failures, so many surprises, upsurges, hesitations, but also so many prolific victories all of them belonging to the history of art creation. When in 1973 I noticed the ceramist Lucretia Milea's debut with her first projects which were actually as many hopes connected with the endeavor of a deliberate renewal it seemed to me that the young artist was on the point to acknowledge her target at the crossing of at least two prevalent tendencies. Indeed choosing a type of art which should change in order to correspond to a new spirit at the end of the 20th century, the artist adapted her activity to the exigencies of the modern life the rigidity of the fixed ideas missing closely connected with the industrial technique capable to achieve repeatable forms purer and purer with primordially aesthetical consequences and not necessary functional or decorative ones.

After a short period of emotional affinity with the art of sculpture Lucretia Milea's concerns aimed with cautious perseverance and elaborate consistency towards the projection of some works meant to confer aesthetical reality upon the space incorporated in our human system. By space we mean not only those limits in which an action or an event takes place but first and foremost the objective, universal from of the existence of the matter having the appearance of an uninterrupted three dimensional whole expressing order in the co-existence of the real world objects and also the distance between them, their size and extent.

In this space art shows up moulding and controlling the ambiental environment sometimes creating an artificial milieu where the tempestuous nature forces can be arranged, slowed down or reduced to a human scale, as if in a laboratory.
The idea of this space where all kind of compositions come out having different forms created by means of their rhythmic alternation or by the succession of volumes and vacuums, is inseparable from our existence as well as from our senses, the space being necessary to the life itself, developing and enriching the perceptions of sensuous orientation.

The material by means of which Lucretia Milea places her works in space reveals its structure often made up of mobile elements with absolute clarity, their joining being organized in such a way that none of the parts is prevalent on the others and none is subordinated to the others. That is the way the assembly is clearly made up of forms that do not contradict the nature of the material but, on the contrary, they emphasize it out.

Lucretia Milea's art imposes itself also as a phenomenon of the well-disciplined creation in an epoch of conscious omposition opposite to artistic activities having as a starting point the whimsical impulse of inspiration. Anew artistic vision appropriate to be achieved on a large scale in serial manufacture, opposes itself to the sensuous ways of representing reality, this imagery being issued from the reproduction of certain phenomena; it also opposes to those artists creating only in the limits of their own lyricism. Such a morphological and functional transformation occurred in ceramics all along the last decades corresponds to that new conscience tempting to create an equilibrium between the universal and the individual, this being the necessary condition for the fine arts to rule harmoniously in the general contemporary existence.

The circumstances of this transformation have not been imposed from the outside world by a certain theory; they have organized themselves naturally, organically in the new spirit of the present society and life, of the new interhuman relationship under the sign of hope of universality of our epoch. With this first personal exhibition Lucretia Milea comes up not only as an artist mastering the technical skills of a very old art but also being very cleared up with the aim, the use and the social necessity of her creations. The artist can accomplish the duty towards her own qualities and strengths all having been used in order to settle a new principle of creation showing no individual vanity. This happens because Lucretia Milea belongs to the big family of artists surviving the centuries by means of their anonymous creations like the creators of the Middle Age architecture or like the craftsmen of the extraordinary collective work which is the folk art of our own people issued from a communion of ideas, interests and sentiments of national culture and lifestyle.