Bogdan Raţă ring - piece from "Imperfect Perfection" collection

“I am portraying myself, obsessively repeating my image of self, my own body being used as a model many times. I paint my feeling of shame in red and show it to the world. I can afford to insert dozens of ears in my portrait, or making a hand come out of a stomach, but these gestures should not be regarded as acts of amputation or as being something grotesque but as a metaphor of our own identity.”

       Since I first met Bogdan Raţă, I never ceased to closely follow his remarkable evolution. It wasn’t so hard actually, us being friends. I have huge respect for the way in which he carefully paved a road to walk on and believe me; I’m not using big words for nothing.

       I remember the day in which I first had contact with one of his works: it was a drawing, an anatomical study made at the university, which is still present in my mind as if it remained photocopied there. It represented a body, of one of our school’s models, drawn at a scale of one to one. It was lying on one side, with a hand positioned close to its chin, barely touching the ground, like the gentle caress of the first leaf to fall early in autumn. That moment, I felt as if I was only few steps away from perfection, this drawing being only few steps away from me. 

        I’ve always been fascinated with the Renaissance period in which the artist was especially interested in precisely representing emotions through the anatomy of the human body. If we take into account the fact that just a simple, isolated thought puts into action a lot of muscles and changes the position of our body, we will reach to the conclusion that, in order to be a sculptor capable of considering the human body, when representing it, to be a piece of paper to write on a complicated, yet easily decipherable text, that man has to truly dedicate himself to the art he creates. This is the case of Bogdan Raţă, to whom I affectionately and gratefully dedicate the jewel he inspired me to create.

        In his sculptures representing the human body, the presence of ears, hands and feet is vividly perceived. To tackle his works, I have designed a ring made of transparent plexiglass, which has, as a representative part, a real size ear. To hear means not only to perceive sounds and then transmit them to the brain. Hearing is a sense which also has a socio-human value. Conceptually speaking, the act of hearing is a symbol of one being part of society: to hear is to place yourself outside of you and inside the one you have in front and to be present, body and spirit, in that particular place. 

       The hand, because of the multitude of actions we use it for, is one of the most visible parts of our body for the human preceptors around us, which means that, by wearing this jewel on it, the importance of this sense called hearing is continuously pointed out. -
Written by Aurora Dan

material: carved perspex

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