:BARIL, Cluj Napoca
For ART-O-RAMA 2016 Cluj Napoca-based gallery :BARIL presents a duo show with Mihai Plătică (b.1983) and Bogdan Vlăduță (b.1971). With an obvious difference in their approaches, both of them are reaching similar levels of profoundness in the way of dealing with body.
Mihai Platica majored in Photography at the University of Arts and Design in Cluj. In his work, he investigates the body by way of three major forms. The first one shows bodies taken out of their contexts. It is a sort of nakedness but not the one of the lack of clothing but that of the lack of environment. Another explored territory is the marks that bodies are leaving behind them or spaces that they are shaping and occupying. The signature that someone retraced – one hand following another hand’s movement, the first characters that a baby’s hands type on a keyboard, the swimming pool where there are no bodies only many possibilities of bodies are subtle exemples of a way to natural physical presence. And a third way of exploring the techniques of the bodies are objects and forms produced by bodily reactions or interpreted through physical effects.
On the other hand, Bogdan Vlădută known as a painter, creates works that reveal the relics, both human and man-made. He draws metaphorical connections between living figures and objects, paradoxically aligning them to the same metaphysical vibration. Portraits, self-portraits, urban landscapes—in various forms, Vladuta’s works share an interest in subtly exposing the ways in which the past lies just beneath the surface of the present. Vibrant, bust-length portraits of living people, self portraits or just anonymous figures, are juxtaposed with different kind of objects, fragments that seem to gauge those who are adjacent. Vlăduță has described his process as akin to that of an “archeologist”; he attempts to uncover the meaning of artifacts (including human artifacts) that live on in spite of the disappearance of their original context.
Having Mihai and Bogdan together in the same booth at ART-O-RAMA, we will obtain a good tension between the two different aproaches, on the same theme of human body.
