Razvan Botis: Cashmere thoughts
Galeria Sabot, Cluj, Cluj-napoca, 05/10/2016 - 06/25/2016
59-61 Henri Barbusse street
Visitors are kindly requested to leave no emotional baggage
unattended! (Those of you unequipped with souls or ectoplasm, ignore this
request.) We assume no liability for castaway psychic robes! Attention please!
Fickle soul snatchers are lurking along this still life smorgasbord exhibition!
Sneaky play-acting attention seekers fishing for psychic soulfood. Extreme
caution is advised! Chameleon like kaolin creatures are cruising the
tablecloths. Animate clay configurations hungrily seeking to take our breaths
away. A momentary lapse in vigilance and they strike, urgent doctorfish with no
patience, nibbling off the corners of consciousness we're parading for them
here. Their surreal existence is built on our reverent wet respirations. They
sift it through their every glazed and confused pore, and break out in sparkling
rainbow-colored pyrotechnic fits of vitality. Visitors are once again kindly
asked to exercise empathetic caution around these creatures!
Turncoated soul
sniffers. Multitudinous shapewhiffting creatuzoids. Deceptive allomorphic
protoentities. Primeval playdough pals from the Eozoic. These fiends scatter
their grotesquely overexaggerated humanoid features in the hope that we'll take
pity on them and lean in a little closer and perhaps breathe a little of our
living souls into them. But do not yield to temptation, they are mere
proto-entities of the mental cosmos. Not native to our spiritual barracks, they
aren't visitors to our everydays. Bizarre clod dreambuds. Proteiform amoebas
hankering after soul-sniffets. Proto-entities living under the guise of
chameleonic glazewraps. These braintwisted oddities harbor pagan spirits. Yet
like us, they too are vulnerable beings looking for love. Perhaps the very
reason they take shape in allochromatically colorshifting metal glazing is to
infiltrate our world unnoticed. They are of the same dust and clay as us, the
same ancestral alchemized humus. But unlike us, they have at least passed
through a trial by fire. They parade their scars and cracks with pride. Their
blazened glaze skin has come through with shed colors, their rainbow iridescence
beaming coral yellow, slag brown, decayed wind-flower pink, simmering soupy
azure, moldy mildew-gray and deathly white, cadaver carmine and gross green, and
anointed in blighted bronze.
If in fact they fail to gather enough of our
attention, enough of our stolen breath and nibbled lives, then they'll have to
resort to summoning a couple of itinerant ghosts from beyond the space-time
continuum, to ensure their eventual transition to gnomity. It goes without
saying that such an ordeal would have an unforeseeable impact on our
civilization's sexual-political habitat. In case even that alogical ritual
should meet failure, well, they will be doomed to a state of discolorification.
And in these times, who of us would want to be unglazed, an empty vessel? It
seems that new-fangled man is bent on just such an endeavor, day after day, in
ever growing numbers. When humanoids surrender their souls that way, there's
always a glaze goblin there to suck it on up, courtesy of the subcortex adobe
kneading master Răzvan Botiş.
On the far side of purgatorial firing, these
hand-formed critters tap into the Earth's core dreams and crystallized them to
their own exteriors. These sparkling iridescent surface deposits are soon
wrinkled into a leathery tincture afflicted skin-glaze. It is the type of beauty
the Japanese refer to as shibumi, a humble and unobtrusive beauty, effortless
perfection, articulated brevity, living harmony, noble quietude, all of these
promote spiritual tranquility. Japanese tea cups are glazed in honor of the
volatile interplay between five basic elements (fire, water, earth, wind, and
void) and the fickle forces of nature. Unwittingly perhaps, Botiş approaches his
medium, namely the dancing flames of clay and metal glaze, in a similarly
undirected and playful spirit.
His creatures of allomorphic substance summon
up atavistic memories from beyond the ocean, the precolumbian ceramics of moche
culture. Their primary features weren't as much functional, as
antropo-zoomorphic and magical. These creations of Botiş' brain kneading had
passed through the cleansing fires of alchemy and harvested the fruits of
idleness. They are useless vessels for eating and drinking, serving only to
nourish the spirit. To make sense of them, one must approach analogically. Like
the prehistoric moche ceramics, these phantasmal coat-encrusted clayforms are
unaffected by the classical canon of ideas. They have only just been brought
into this world by the „arch-spirit”. They still retain a connection to the
formless spirit of Nanny Earth.
Having gatecrashed our picnic, they are now
mingling with our ordinary, lifeless everyday objects, no doubt doing their best
to fit in. Playing the field in true harlequin style, their chameleonic mantles
are mimicking the leatherette oils of our famous paintings.
These mountings
aren't scenes of any real miracles, merely the inordinately subtle infiltration
of the fantastic. We are witnessing a contemporary artistic ritual, to render us
into daytime dreamcatchers.