SimionZamsa won prizes at the Moldova Salons '92 (for the etchingThe Ladder) and at the national competition Bacoviana in the city of Bacau (1994), and is generally sought after by exhibition organizers and private collectors.

The geography of his work's distribution covers four continents: Europe, Africa, Asia and America. Germany and Bulgaria, France and Iceland, Finland and Spain, Nepal and Tunisia, Nicaragua and Russia, not to mention Romania and his native Moldova are countries in which artlovers have had the opportunity to become acquainted with the artist's work.

In spite of all the difficultiesencumberingourart market, which is currently still in an incipient and pitiful state in terms of authenticspiritualvalues, Simion Zamsa seems to have broken the wall of anonymity, unbreakable at first sight, becoming through his work a permanent presence in a number of prestigious private collections in Israel, USA, France, England and Sweden.

In essence, we are all diggers in one way or another: some dig for vestiges, others for potatoes, some unearth forgotten books, others dig out the earth from undertheir bosses. The spade and the pickaxe are always around—if not in reality, then at leastfiguratively. Simion Zamsa, too, is a digger. Literally and figuratively.

The artist has replaced the spade and the pickaxe with the engraving needle and lithographic tools; the earth, or the dust of the archives, with the stone plate of lithography or the metal plate fated to acids. And, most importantly, he has been skillful in channeling his predilection for digging and archeology in the right direction: the persistence of memory.

It is memory that has become the leitmotif of the artist's work in thelast five or six years. The artist-witness, equipped with a camera (etching), strives to steal from the transitory a long sequence in order to bestow on it theglitter of eternity. The "Seal" transports us into the long-forgotten world of Mesopotamia's cuneiform writing, Oriental despots, Hammurabian legislation and Babylonian astrology. The Burden (inspired by Nicolae Dabija's poetry), with its crucifixion and the starry ox, seems to whispers in our ear: "Don't let the memory go, no matter how painful it may be!"

Memory is something sacred. Sometimes it is part of the sacred. Memory defies time even when it acquires tempestuous speed. In this manner, rocking on the wings of the tempest, the church will endure in time and through time. It is not by accidentthat the work too is titledThrough Time (1988).

In order for memory to be alive, perennial,able to renew, it has to be cyclicaljustlike time, like nature. Just as the "solar unity" is cyclical in all the cultures of the world. From the Geto-Dacian Zamolxis to the Mid-American Quetzalcoatl nobody will dare stop the periodicity and rhythmic beat of the Universe. For this is exactly the guarantee of eternity and salvation.

Not even the Red King in his insane hunt {The Hunt of the Red King) will dare threatenuniversal harmony. The Serpent's Eye (etching) or the She-Wolf (china ink, pen) will always keep watch and never allow anything to breach the predestination.

We find again the Etruscan she-wolf—a symbol of Rome—in The Ladder (etching), which is a discoursededicated to the Pythagorean ascensionmaterialized in the black-brown color in the middle of the sheet. To what does the ascensionstrive? The answer is up to the viewer.

Two of the artist's accomplishments, in terms of execution and richness of graphic texture, are The Cardinals and the The Table of Silence or the Serpent's Eye. Partially influencedby the work of Manzu and Brancusi, they stand as metaphors for communication through silence. As the archeological vestiges that scream in their speechlessness, so the cardinals keep silent. But how eloquenttheir figures, the profiles of their headdress. The grotesque characters from theTable of Silence aw speechless too. But do we really want to know what they speakabout?

The etching of Janus seems to synthesizetheartist'sphilosophy. Here we can see both the face andthe reverse. Both the irony and the drama of duration. Janus, this old Latin deity, with his two faces and all the implications for the calendar (January!) is both judge and puppet, an impassable wall and an widely open door. The future and the past, these two irreconcilable adversaries and premises of history, find in Janus their origin and reconciliation. Youth and old age coincide in the bicephalous hermae carrying two profiles. Is this another witness to the cyclicalandperiodic nature of the