Marius Ritiu transforms copper into forms that evoke meteorites and cosmic relics-textured, cratered objects that appear carved by extraterrestrial forces. Working between sculpture and furniture, the 41-year-old Antwerp-based artist uses a self-developed hammering technique to turn industrial copper sheets into objects that feel unearthed rather than designed. He anneals thin plates with a blow torch, then hammers them against rocks, lifting their textures and cavities before cutting, arranging, and soldering the fragments into seemingly solid volumes that mimic geological mass while remaining unexpectedly light. "I basically trashing the metal, taking a full plate and placing it on a rock and starting to hammer it," Ritiu says of his intuitive approach, which defied anything he was formally taught.
Ritiu was born in Satu Mare, Romania, five years before the collapse of the communist regime, to a construction engineer father and an accountant mother. He discovered sculpture, in the form of clay, while in high school; a teacher recognized his talent and encouraged him to pursue it further. After earning both bachelor's and master's degrees in sculpture in Romania, he and a fellow student set off on what was meant to be an exploratory tour of European cities - Brussels, Ghent, Cologne, Dusseldorf, Amsterdam, London -- with vibrant artistic communities and academies where they might continue their studies. Their first stop: Antwerp. "In six months we were accepted at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, we met a collector with a foundation, and a gallerist who gave us a solo show."
They never left. For years, Ritiu and his friend worked as a team, "concept driven multi-media artists," who explored various mediums ranging from public space interventions and "guerilla" works to figurative and sculptures. Their introduction to copper came via a professor who tapped them to help craft and install copper ornamentation on the cupola of a local church. "This was where I learned to anneal copper," Ritiu recalled of the experience, which involved working on scaffolding 30 meters high with no harnesses or hard hats. A few years later, they spent a summer learning traditional copper techniques from family of Romanis [a group known for their traditionally itinerant lifestyle and rich cultural heritage] in Romania.
In 2017, his partner decided to explore other opportunities, and Ritiu was left on his own, with a material that still intrigued him. Over the years he developed his version of a traditional repoussé technique, one that demands relentless physicality, with thousands, sometimes millions of blows per piece, using very rudimentary hammers. He forgoes sketches or molds, letting forms emerge organically as plates conform to boulders up to a ton in weight. "Usually when I hammer the copper on rocks I take some shapes and some textures and then plate by plate I remove them and assemble them in a different shape," he explains. Soldering conceals seams while polishing or patina adds luster or entropy. Zero-waste is top of mind; dismantled monumental works from residencies like Socrates Sculpture Park get disassembled and reborn, often multiple times.
"Copper is the physical material that connects the world," Ritiu notes, invoking its role in wiring communication and transport networks that erase borders. His introduction to meteorites via a fortuitous encounter with a NASA employee at Ars Electronica (a festival sponsored by an Austrian scientific institute of the same name) sparked his cosmic bent. "I'm inspired by the structure, shapes, textures and colors of these meteors," he says. "The works I'm making seem to be copied from nature but the actual shapes I present in the end are non existing in nature."
At Dernier Cri, Ritiu presents Hot Seat from Space, a raw, muscular chair with a faceted, pockmarked surface; it weighs in at just 15 kilos despite a deceptive heft. The Platypus was co-created with his wife Ileana Moro while on a residency in Spain. Here, copper sheaths were hammered over tree-trunk slabs, yielding a hybrid low table whose improbable form echoes the platypus, which Ritiu calls a "distant cousin" to the meteor works. Like Hot Seat, it balances sculpture with the intimacy of furniture, suggesting pieces that look grown rather than built.
