Intro Nothing could be more prosaic, yet at the same time more exciting than the image of two men on a motorcycle, riding off into the unknown on a scorching August afternoon! The man holding the handlebars, perfectly in control of the two-wheeled vehicle, is in his prime. The other man, of senior age and with an aristocratic elegance, holds on to the shoulders of the one in front of him. The camaraderie between the two, their mutual trust, is so obvious that you immediately find yourself speculating about their relationship: they don't seem to be father and son because they don't look alike. And yet, there is a family resemblance. They both seem to be cut from the same cloth: you immediately detect their taste for adventure, for travel. You sense a quest in the powerful roar of the engine, which the older man seems to have passed on to the younger man. And then you understand: they are master and disciple, and their family trait is art. An art in continuous motion, achieved with acute lucidity and the pleasure of taking risks: for it is the unknown forms that they aim for! The above literary introduction reveals, I believe, the core of this exhibition: more than in any other field of activity, the teacher-student relationship is defining in art. Titu Toncian's artistic profile—formed in the late 1970s at Ana Lupaș's "school," an active member of the 1980s generation, with decisive professional recognition in the 1990s—is completed by highlighting his role as a mentor. His collaboration with Dan Alban began twenty years ago, when Dan became his student. Their common ground was ceramics, but not the kind made on a potter's wheel, which Dan doesn't even know how to use—hence his rebellious project of turning a motorcycle into a dynamic tool for working with clay, a project that became the motif for the literary image I developed in the introduction. The ceramics school where Titu Toncian trained—in a particular political and institutional climate—is eminently one of multimedia artistic experimentation, of questioning the object, of valuing materiality, and of formal explorations that hybridize or transgress diverse artistic media. Even if Titu Toncian's works in the present exhibition—objects or installations in the field of sculptural ceramics—may suggest a devotion to the "purity" of the medium, we will soon see other facets of the artist that will be revealed in the exhibition currently being prepared at the Quadro Gallery, which is dedicated to him. Titu Toncian's artistic research methods left their mark on his students and, implicitly, on Dan Alban. Interested in the encounter between ceramics and new technologies, with a Cartesian clarity of the issues he raises and obvious or discreet references to both contemporary art history and current urban and social life, Dan Alban continues his teacher's art, even if his vision of the world is nourished by other sources. As I said in the introduction: their dissimilarity, that is, the differences between them, does not prevent them from exuding an air of family. Titu Toncian's arms on Dan's shoulders in the balancing act of the motorcycle signify, I think, the miracle of continuity in the face of any end. Mara Rațiu (Curator)