IOMO Gallery

During high school, my tutoring Romanian teacher, advocating for Obama who was just about to be elected to his first term, told me to pay attention to the way he gesticulates during speeches, his hands. His theory was that great orators do not raise their hands above shoulder level, the opposite example being reserved for dictators. Later, at the university of art, in the workshops that still deal with the transformation of one substance into another and with the study of nature, the custom circulated that the same degree of difficulty involved in capturing features in a portrait was necessary for the subject's hands. Here, moreover, the hands are seen as a characteristic double-portrait. Reading about the duodecimal numeral system I learned how Sumerians like, still some old men in the marketplaces, used it naturally starting from the hand, where the font naturally counts all 12 phalanges of the other fingers. Prosopagnosia is a rare medical condition in which patients can no longer see the faces of others and where they often come to recognize the people around them by their hands instead of their faces.I make this introductory digression about the importance of this limb that has become a symbol because the new series of works by Cătălin Bădărău, now presented for the first time in all its completeness, once again has at its centre as its subject, not surprisingly for anyone familiar with the artist's production, the same hands. Until recently almost exhaustively treated almost exhaustively as a representation of the real problems of the conditions of brute labor - guided by an early biographical experience in the field of undeclared labor - in recent years, for the artist, the hand seems to have exhausted its everyday, routine rhetorical valences and has entered the symbolic plane. First, through the previous exhibition, "Washing the Guilt Away", but intensively after 2020, through these works in which the hand is invested with the action of the raised index finger, with the clenched fist, of Toma's gesture.So, here is how in his work the hand is the fetish itself [as a relic, as a definitive gesture of raw flesh], the one that psychoanalysis understands as an improbable object, invested with a strong desire and diverted from its proper purpose. For him, however, the object of fetish is, like that of a cultic artifact, fundamentally different from the object of the line, derived from the capitalist economy of commodity exchange, the typical fetish of today. Perhaps the ambiguity of these hands as both surgical flesh and cultural artifact is irreducible. The relationship between the solemn of sculpture, analogous in our minds to the typical monument, commemorative or celebratory, in anatomical hypostasis, makes these works all the more intimate, all the more natural, tending toward the definitive. Although not opposed to traditional categories of sculpture such as the monumental and his monumental, Bădărău often models materials that resemble in appearance and tactility the fluids, veins, and flesh of the body, materials that are often soft or warm, such as polyurethane or synthetic resins, sponge, foam, silicone, burlap, gauze, twine, or glass. If historically, overwhelmingly entropically, sculpture has had the human figure as its favorite subject, here we can say that sculpture is literally about the body. If in the choice of subject we mention a profound personal experience, this choice of materials is also doubled by another, the work of a carpenter and upholsterer, before beginning his studies. When the immediate is not blocked in the transmission of messages about the world, but is the very source, we are always dealing with a genuine author.Moreover, these materials have a liminal aesthetic, personal and remote at once, butaphorically cardboardy like the rest of a package in which a product has stood, recalling the "marfarization" of the body by those in power, inked to us through the recognizability of a gesture at the root of culture [Thomas's gesture]. It is, formally, a kind of symbolic abstraction, in which the body is out there somewhere, at the intersection of anatomical structure and symbolic reference. Through the processual aspects of his work, Cătălin Bădărău brings fundamental oppositions to the fore, through a direct confrontation of incongruous physical and formal attributes: hardness/softness, roughness/roughness precision/arbitrariness, molding/free form, "natural" surface/industrial construction - falling and floating, gravity and transcendence, all give the works a character that is at once unstable, insistent material and metaphorical. Because sculpture is more than the other artistic genres tributary to the figurative, material & consistent in its trace, it is perhaps also easier to categorize quantitatively within a formal cultural history. Therefore, we can say that Cătălin Bădărău's artistic production would place him in perhaps the most strongly manifested branch of the medium in our country, after the 70s-80s, the neo-orthodox in subject and neo-expressionist in form, not by its direct approach, but intelligently treated, naturalistic and visceral in the first instance, to then draw you into the core of issues that relate to the transgression of the self and its purpose in the world. Curatorial text by Horațiu Lipot