Build a ladder from your bones

Mismatched planets, vestiges of failed futures, and jolly yet dumbfounded emissaries nurture a troubling ambivalence. Their expressions hint at a subtle threat: that the distress they embody is not speculative but imminent.

Build a ladder from your bones reiterates Cristian Raduta’s sharp critique of humanity’s obsessive interest in breaking terrestrial barriers and reaching other planets and galaxies. Landed in the generous realm of Sandwich Neurohope, Raduta’s slim-figured, stretched animals and birds, cast in aluminium, resin, or bronze, become the more-than-human cosmic cadets, carriers of man’s repeated failed attempts to reign over extraterrestrial space. Echoing real-life dystopian enterprises such as SpaceX's project or the multiple space trips undertaken by the world’s billionaires, the title also gestures towards a recurrent anatomic motif - the bone, repurposed as a constitutive element in shaping the body of works.

Raduta’s messengers encounter the public with the same detached cautiousness, invading any given space while successfully remaining strikingly absent. Rarely facing each other, the sculptures seem to follow their own inertial trajectory, blending in an alienated diorama. Embracing the early sculptural assemblage movement while avoiding the sterility of the ready-made, Răduță roots his formal references in the immediacy of Etruscan frescoes, where slender domestic and exotic animals assert their presence with quiet tension. The deliberate choice of the forms keeps the viewer at a certain distance, creating a space around the works that should not be overstepped.

What stands out and intensifies the (apparently) fragile grace of these creatures is the way they are made: Răduță first models in polystyrene, a medium that allows the rapidity of gesture and the spontaneity of a three-dimensional sketch. The resulting form becomes the mould for casting, and the artist often chooses not to fully smooth the surface, allowing pores, joints, and traces of the process to remain visible — markers of the gesture’s tension and the urgency embedded in the sculpture.

As the sculptural equivalent of drawing, this approach allows the more-than-human messengers to unmask the so-called “noble” ventures of humankind with striking directness. Răduță exposes their contradictions: the grander the ambition and desire to escape our planet, the more precarious, porous, and inadequate are the materials that stand in for these dreams. Materials that, in essence, reveal our inability to flee ourselves.

In this sense, Build a ladder from your bones becomes a grounded warning, an invitation to look at the fragile architectures of our aspirations before they collapse under their own weight.