Sentinel

Works featured in the artist’s exhibition “Build a ladder from your bones”. Reiterating Cristian Raduta’s sharp critique of humanity’s obsessive interest in breaking terrestrial barriers and reaching other planets and galaxies. Raduta’s slim-figured, stretched animals and birds, cast in aluminum, resin, or bronze, become the more-than-human cosmic cadets, carriers of man’s repeated failed attempts to reign over extraterrestrial space. (...)

Raduta’s messengers encounter the public with the same detached cautiousness, invading any given space while successfully remaining strikingly absent. (...) What stands out and intensifies the (apparently) fragile grace of these creatures is the way they are made: Răduță first models in polystyrene, a medium that allows the rapidity of gesture and the spontaneity of a three-dimensional sketch. The resulting form becomes the mould for casting, and the artist often chooses not to fully smooth the surface, allowing pores, joints, and traces of the process to remain visible — markers of the gesture’s tension and the urgency embedded in the sculpture. As the sculptural equivalent of drawing, this approach allows the more-than-human messengers to unmask the so-called “noble” ventures of humankind with striking directness.