For the 2024 edition of RAD, Zina Gallery presents a project by artists Codruța Cernea, Lorena Cocioni, and Giulia Crețulescu. Multiple artistic mediums are brought together – painting, textile, ceramics, installation – conveying one main converging point: the body-object relationship. With interests in the study of human and non-human organic forms and object design, the works create a dialogue about corporeality and its inner and outer surroundings.

In Codruța Cernea’s neo-romantic mental laboratories and landscapes, affectivity is artificially re-created, inseparable from the body of today’s world. In her works, Codruța Cernea builds comfortably-strange realms, with symbolically charged elements in timeless spaces or spaceless times. Lorena Cocioni presents a series of ceramic sculptures and installations that follow her investigations of gendered perception of spaces, the female body, and object design. Using references from literature, mythology, and film, her glazed stoneware renders interior body parts and cavities turned inside-out that mimic the structures and shapes of everyday household design.

The multidimensional and posthuman body is explored simultaneously in Giulia Crețulescu’s textiles but takes a slightly different stand. Starting from her extensive library of images of ergonomic surfaces, solutions, and other human-centered designs – from the strapping systems on backpacks to prosthetic devices or quilted fabrics used in the automotive industry, she builds aesthetic objects without function that resemble bodily structures through uneven and gradual reconfigurations of objects.

Thus, each of the three distinct visual languages reveals extensive research, each being enlarged continuously, while always coming back to its core ideatic layer. Through melding together Giula Crețulescu’s geometrical configurations, Lorena Cocioni’s ceramics molded into organic shapes, and Codruța Cernea’s ever-expanding technofantasy landscapes, the continuous reshaping of the human body inside-out and its interchangeability with its environment and objects are exposed.