The decorative principle is fundamental to art – this has been nearly forgotten in the contemporary art scene, saturated with Conceptualism. Understanding of ornament as a visual language is central to our grasp of what art is. In different ways, artists in this exhibition explore the enlightening power of ornament inherent in visual forms. These forms communicate to the viewer either through symbols, ciphers, pictograms or through exotic or extinct alphabets made visible in order to resurrect a language that does not touch our ear, but only our eye. Sometimes, they evoke certain sensations in the viewer through the entire composition of the work: colors, lines, shapes, and their relationships. In any case, for artists in this show, ornament becomes a vital component of expression, subverting its more accepted definition as an external addition to a work, a mere embellishment.