The exhibition “Centaurs behind the mirror” – decorative, deviant, abstract, contemporary art style, Alin Ladaru PhD

The pandemic. In the ISPE Office (today Lacul Tei Offices), doing daily work for enLife, communication with people, friends, clients during the pandemic was increasingly limited, almost non-existent and at one point I was completely alone for months in the office and warehouse, alone right on the 2nd floor and on many days I think there were only a few people “on my toes” in the whole building. I felt like painting again and after a few failed canvases I said to myself: “how about painting a bust of a mannequin in acrylic colors”, after which 2 more came and then about 10-12 and suddenly I was surrounded of mannequins that I started pairing, suspending them on wheelchairs and constantly applying objects from around to pierce them, cut them, glue them, talk to them in the absurd silence around them. Keep calm, I did not exaggerate, I have the exercise during the internships at Socola in Iasi and I have always been fascinated by the madness, the schizophrenia especially the creative one and the diurnal bipolarity of many of us, including mine. We are, as a contemporary psychiatrist said: half schizophrenic and the rest obsessive-compulsive.

The symbol. Centaurs are in antithesis with renowned knights and riders. Instead of taming their instincts, centaurs let themselves be guided by them. They symbolize desire, violence, brutality, adultery, revenge and the devil. They represent the struggle between good and evil, moderation and excess, passion and property, revenge and forgiveness, faith and unbelief, god and beast. (Wikipedia, Centaur Carrying a Nymph (1892) by Laurent Marqueste (Tuileries Gardens, Paris)

The 7 Centaurs are the spirits of the living and the dreamers, they are the cores of their personal planets that attract in an irreversible Gravity useless objects, but chosen from the harp’s eyelid holder, objects that floated adrift and with their newborn scream landed on body giving it shape. They have in them a silent, sullen, cheeky, lecherous magnetism and whatever words I use impress you with the sensuality and indifference with which they do not look at you, they have something to do inside them, invisible to you, and at the foot of each double body, tired of singing, lies either a whole skull or a fragment, once used in anatomy courses or BMF surgery workshops, or they are even the pre-operative 3D models of some patients who needed cranioplasty.

Poems. Each centaur was born from a white verse or a white verse was born from the back and dissected deltoid of a centaur. Don’t listen to him, don’t hear him, he speaks to you like another inner voice. Stop whining! Some poems in white verse (link)>>

The history of these emotions, feelings and spirits began forever but took the form of the pain of some people whom I began to see in hospitals starting from the fall of 2001 when I started working as a medical representative in Cantacuzino, Fundeni and Floreasca hospitals through the departments of cardio-vascular surgery and orthopedics where patients with diabetic foot in advanced stages or traumatic patients who suffered leg or thigh amputations came. I saw the empathy of some surgeons, the mercy with which they decided these dramatic moments with patients, but also the commerciality with which some of them considered numbers, quantities… and then the day or days after the operation when, through a mechanism of neuroplasticity, the patient still felt his missing limb . and the rest, later people crushed under the fury of their destiny with bones that needed Ti rods and plates to recover… until 10 years ago when I came into contact with patients with cranial defects who needed the completion of a defect then in different areas of the head to look whole again like other people.