Snapshot Romania or about art as a "business card"

147 contemporary Romanian artists from different generations accepted the unusual invitation launched by the Benetton Foundation a few months ago: to work on a miniature canvas, 10 x 12 cm, and to participate in a democratic project dedicated to the global artistic phenomenon: the Imago Mundi collection. The result of this challenge is Snapshot Romania. Contemporary Artists from Romania, published by Fabrica and the Benetton Foundation, which proposes, for the first time, a panoramic view of Romanian contemporary art, starting from a unique concept in the landscape of current challenges in the field of visual arts.

Without the intention of advancing hierarchies of value and without the ambition of completeness, Snapshot Romania is, as its title suggests, a collection-instant, a cross-section in the diversity of artistic language and media in Romania today. The 10 x 12 cm miniature canvas, with its "pocket", "business card" or "greeting card" format, is, as Claudio Scorretti, the curator of the project, states in the preface to the volume, "a unique podium, of maximum visibility, one equal for each artist, as an exercise in extracting the square root of their own creativity or as a trial by fire of its expression, on a symbolic surface of 120 ^cm2".

From non-figurative aesthetics to conceptual art, from photography to abstract art, collage, graphics, street art or object, the diversity of style and artistic language deployed in this volume makes up - Cosmin Năsui emphasizes in his preface to Snapshot Romania - "a coherent picture of contemporary artistic production, democratizing taste without imposing stylistic directions of cultural consumption, leaving free and diverse information about creativity".

Artists from different generations and spaces, born between 1939 and 1991, find their place in a group photograph representative of the last 60 years of Romanian contemporary art. An approach that aims to present, together, the variety of forms and media of artistic expression active today in Romania, reserving a generous space of expression for artists of the new generation. A broad and democratic perspective in which Luciano Benetton, the founder of the Imago Mundi collection and a true traveler by vocation, sees - in the opening words of the first pages of the volume - a living and original dialog, in the field of art, between "Romania's archaic past and the present as a European laboratory".

On the map of the Imago Mundi collection, which from 2008 to the present day comprises 15 collections from 34 countries, each country is represented by the works of established artists or young talents, in the spirit of maximum freedom of expression and a single "constraint": the 10 x 12 cm format. Under the aegis of Fabrica and Fondazione Benetton Studi Ricerche, Imago Mundi is a democratic, non-commercial project that aims to map the artistic phenomenon globally. With a special focus on artistic spaces not always promoted by the mainstream international art scene, the Imago Mundi collection includes artists from Latin America, Australia, Eastern Europe, Russia, China, Mongolia, the United States, to Japan, India, South Korea, Kenya, Tanzania, Zanzibar, Azerbaijan, Senegal and Afghanistan.

The Snapshot Romania catalog is available online on the project's virtual platform, www.imagomundiart.com, where Romanian artists have their own personalized profile in the mosaic of more than 2,700 works currently coloring the world's geography in the Imago Mundi collection. "Our intention - says Luciano Benetton - is to tour the collection as much as possible, to make the extraordinary effervescence of contemporary art known to the public around the world, which we present in exhibitions, in dedicated catalogs and on our web platform. We believe that meaning, ideas, thought and inspiration are not the monopoly of a small group, but develop through interaction and communication. We aim to have 10,000 artists from 60 countries by 2016."

Snapshot Romania will be presented in Bucharest for the first time in 2014, alongside the latest collections realized in other corners of the world by the Benetton Foundation. In 2015, the collection dedicated to Romanian contemporary art will be exhibited in a side event at the Venice Art Biennale. Currently, the catalog can be purchased online on Fabrica's website (http://fabricashop.myshopify.com/), on the publisher's website (www.terra-ferma.it), in major online bookstores and will be on sale in bookstores and museums.

Snapshot Romania, Contemporary Artists from Romania, Fabrica, Imago Mundi Collection, 2013, 348 p.

Curator: Claudio Scorretti, in collaboration with Irina Ungureanu

Introductions: Luciano Benetton, Claudio Scorretti, Cosmin Năsui

Cover: Teodor Graur, From Home with Love