Ștefan Radu Crețu (born 1983) lives and works in Sibiu. He has a BA in Ceramics from the Art and Design University of Cluj-Napoca and a PhD from the National University of Art, Bucharest. His most recent exhibitions include Earth’s Predictions. About Ecological Thinking and Practice”, Cotroceni National Museum, Bucharest (2021, group) and ”After twelve years”. The Romanian Artistic Production in 180 works”, MNAC, Bucharest (2020, group). His works explore ideas of locomotion and movement, either terrestrial, aquatic or aerial, and analyze the relationship between their natural/organic and artificial/technological manifestations, resulting in abstract bi and tri-dimensional syntheses.

We are going through an era of rapid shifts; it seems that nothing can become stable anymore. Humankind is on an evolutionary wave that found a balance point along with its decline that advances simultaneously or in a connected way.

Hybridization seems like a sustainable solution for these times. We drive hybrid cars, we cultivate a hybrid agriculture, fight hybrid wars, and have hybrid seasons; it seems as if nothing can be identified as un-hybridized, as pure. Maybe nothing should be pure or nothing ever was, or maybe precisely this transition leads to a steady result, but for now we are caught up in this transitional era of hybridization. 

My piece for PAV is obviously an installation, a hybrid within art, a subspecies of sculpture, a juxtaposition of abstract and figurative geometrized elements.

The installation I propose is a metaphor that suggests the self-sufficiency of a closed circuit, close to the utopian concept of perpetuum mobile, a concept that will probably be the next step for hybridization, or in any case, a superior version of it. 

 

The installation consists of a tree made of metal, almost 6 m high, where an abstract creature is hanging. This creature is a hybrid animal, geometrized, meaning a hybrid between abstract and figurative, but also a hybrid between several other species of overlapped animals. The work is a kinetic piece and the movement source is represented by a small aquarium pump which drives a wheel from a water mill through the use of water. The water is recirculated in a closed hydraulic circuit inside the triangular tank which also works as a holder for the water wheel at the base of the installation. This rotation movement is taken over by a bended tree and sent forward in a straight-line using steel cables towards the mobile elements of the creature. 

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Exact location: Sibiu (Peron) State Philharmonic