Nautilus
Vladlen Babcinețchi, the protean spirit of this sculptural assembly, also displays his virtues as an original creator in three dimensions. “Nautilus”, his stainless-steel creation, conceived during the days of the camp at Iași Airport, aligns with a direction that has strongly marked the artist's work, the revelation of the golden ratio, that sacred rule to which creators submit by divine command.
This version of the sculpture “Nautilus” evokes Ion Eliade Rădulescu’s mythological “Zburătorul” (The Flyer). Yet the mythology under which the piece takes shape is one of our own time. In this inspired sculptural transposition, man is a “Winged Being.” He spreads his butterfly wings to embrace and encompass the entire universe. He is rooted in the earth, but poised to lift off, floating toward the celestial dome in a brush with the angelic.
Grigore ILISEI
As a response to Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, Nautilus continues Vladlen Babcinețchi’s long-standing artistic inquiry, also explored in his doctoral thesis, into the universal application of the golden ratio (1:1.618), including within art. The title itself evokes tension: the nautilus—a marine creature whose shape follows the geometry of the Fibonacci sequence and the organic law of growth rooted in the “golden number”—is contrasted by the actual representation, which is a human silhouette. This figure, with arms fanned out in multiple anatomical positions, echoes classical studies of human proportion. A sculptural embodiment—anchored in classical reference—of the mysterious harmony through which both man and nature (and their interrelation) were created, the monumental stainless steel cutout also takes on an iconic dimension. It becomes a revelation of divine craftsmanship manifested in the world.
Ioan RĂDUCEA
The Vitruvian Motion of Nautilus
Vladlen Babcinețchi is an argonaut—not in search of the golden fleece, but of the golden ratio. In his sculpture, the artist has always approached his creative process with the premise of embedding the imagined and later sculpted forms within this paradigm. His conceptual sources lie in the treatise of the ancient architect Vitruvius. The golden ratio was plastically translated during the Renaissance in 1490, through a unique vision—the iconic drawing “Vitruvian Man” by Leonardo da Vinci.
The paths Vladlen Babcinețchi has walked—and continues to walk—are those of knowledge, drawn from the rich wells of Greco-Roman culture. Yet, the unconventional and the new are also essential elements that define his work. Intuition guides him toward these as much as reason does. A telling example is his first innovative experience, where he broke away from classical relief portraiture and explored negative space, emphasizing the expressive force of concavity. The sculptor began to model like a miner carving out tunnels. Enthralled by this innovation—discovered through intuition and deep readings in philosophy and art history—Vladlen Babcinețchi committed himself with tenacity to this creative formula. He set out to embody his ideas with the unrelenting joy and enthusiasm of an explorer venturing into uncharted territories.
He crafted many such portraits, one of the most memorable being that of Mircea Eliade, doing so with the feeling of having discovered a unique visual language.
Much like the great Romanian physicist Ștefan Procopiu, who discovered the magneton simultaneously with the Dane Niels Bohr (who received the Nobel Prize), Babcinețchi later learned that a Spanish sculptor, Josep Maria Subirachs, had also created in a similar style. Yet Babcinețchi had reached this approach entirely on his own, unaware of the Spanish artist’s concerns. He had arrived at this method independently.
His inquisitive and tireless spirit of seeking the new led him toward what is now revealed to us as the fruit of a feverish imagination and cultural accumulations — a new facet, both unknown and carefully studied: the golden ratio of human movement.
Grigore ILISEI
“The relationship between the Fibonacci sequence and the number Phi is that all ratios of two successive elements in the Fibonacci sequence asymptotically tend toward the ‘golden number’. In this logic, we can say that Phi is the ‘Source’from which all natural structures originate and to which they return, and this is why thinkers and artists from antiquity and the Renaissance referred to it as the ‘divine proportion’.
Starting from the first terms of the Fibonacci sequence—obtained by summing the previous numbers—we have: 0, 1, 1 (1+0), 2 (1+1), 3 (1+2), 5 (2+3), 8 (3+5), 13 (5+8), 21 (8+13), 34 (13+21), 55 (34+21)…
And if we calculate the ratio/division of two consecutive numbers in the sequence, we’ll notice that the results gradually approach Phi (1.618), “from both directions”:
(0), (1), (2), (1.5), (1.66), (1.6), (1.625), (1.61538...), (1.619024...), (1.61764...), … The lower values increase from 1 toward 1.618..., while the higher ones decrease asymptotically from 2 toward 1.618...—which, both mathematically/concretely and metaphorically/symbolically, allows us to understand that natural order tends toward reaching the ideal plane of the ‘golden number,’ in the unfolding and harmonious growth of structures in the natural world.”
Cristian UNGUREANU I “Musique des sphères [The Secret Geometry of European Painting]”, Artes Publishing, Iași, 2016
The Golden Ratio – as Vladlen Babcinețchi insightfully and inspiredly observed, is not only found in static form, but also in dynamic expression. The human being, the perfect divine creation, inscribes their gestures and movement within the same framework of the golden ratio, (...) that is, within the measure of perfection and the absolute.
The artist imagined the spiral and gave it form, placing the human silhouette in a drawing structured according to the golden section, to which he also gave a name – "Nautilus".
He then had the inspired idea to test his imagined form in real life, which he had given artistic expression. He turned to the ballet dancer Vlad Mărculescu, principal soloist of the National Opera in Iași. By spiraling his arms in a sublime fan-like motion, the dancer gave substance to the concept, rounding it in a Vitruvian way and making tangible what had previously existed only in the realm of abstract imagination.
"Nautilus", Vladlen Babcinețchi’s creation, is a joyful addition to the series of images that seek to decipher the mystery and miracle of the divine making of man.
Grigore ILISEI
