There are so many different encounters in life. Constant and predictable, pervious and useful, rare but fruitful, settled in advance but uncomfortable. I am trying to come up with a category for my encounters with Florin Moroşan… Spontaneous and surprising, maybe? Something like that, because our meetings were neither premeditated nor constant, they led to no friendship nor collaboration, except for our latest entanglement! But let’s start with the first one. Consumed back in 1999, when we were both extras for the play “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, directed by V. I. Frunza… A good many years pass and I see him next to Mayor Boc under all sorts of official circumstances, then I attend a conference on Cluj cultural programs and who moderates? Florin. I’m attending a somewhat restricted opening, in a cafe, I’m sharing a table with my colleagues, and… well, with Florin! Some more time passes and we meet again on some kindergarten corridor, each with a corresponding child, and in a while, quite logically, we meet at the school our children attend… Each new phase of me meeting Florin was different from the previous one. Each time he appeared in another context, with another purpose and with another theme. Well, the most unexpected version in which I’ve stumbled upon Florin is him being a maker of objects! I did not expect him to start collecting old pieces wood, to work with epoxy resins, temperatures, technicians, in a workshop, and all that.
Obviously, I asked him how he came to this unpredictable situation?
The workshop Moth is the result of a challenge I came up with two years ago. I have never done such a thing, I mean to produce decorative objects and/or furniture. Some time ago I read Richard Florida – The Rise of The Creative Class. I got curious and went on reading other books and articles on the psychology of creativity and on creative phenomena. Creativity is the ultimate desire to transform the objective world through personal interpretation. We decide when and how this interpretation is or is not useful. I decided to interpret the object table and turned it into a challenge. I chose the table because it is a symbolic object, it is the center of the family or the office. It is the place where decisions are made, business is done, discussions are carried with friends. The way I interpret this object is based on the specifics of this material. More precisely, on what we humans mistakenly identify as imperfections – the knot, the hole, the curve, the mold. I am adding epoxy resins, pigments in those places or steel as support for tops. I decided to mix these materials because they are materials with personality, sometimes difficult to master, and they keep working even after the products are completed. The resin exchanges color with the wood, the shape of the wood changes under the tightening forces of the resin.
Who came up with the logo idea?
In short, in 2016, I detailed to a friend the way I saw this logo, and what it was supposed to convey: something simple, clean, figurative. My friend, Cosmin Negrea by name, is not necessarily a designer. He did three variants along the same line. Then I left the logo he created in … “disuse” for a year. Only after I had started the actual production I launched the building of the site and when I came across the logo again, the young man who did the second version of the site, Sergiu Zaharie, finetuned the original version. So the final version is the result of a brief two friends had worked on.
Personally, I find this intrusive passion into the life of a man who never focused on this or trained for it from the very beginning, interesting. Courage is an essential element here and the joy of making is the optimal bond between idea and final object: A brand is built in time. In my case there is still much to do. But if I had to make a wish about how I would like Moth to evolve, I would say something like that: we are passionately and carefully reconstructing the center of the home for people who are into a balance of the useful and the aesthetic. The subject of analysis is the search for beauty in what we might define as imperfections of the wood. The object we focus upon is the table. The Moth – could she stalk – she would say we should not cover tables with table cloths as something we wanted to hide but we should leave them uncovered in order to be able to follow the story transmitted by wood, steel, and the color mixture in resin. Basically, in just a few words, I would like the attributes of the brand to be – usefulness, creativity, a complementarity of materials, and imperfection turned beautiful through neat and unexpected ways of approach.
Moth products are available on mail ceomoth@gmail.com or at the website www.moth.ro. or on the Facebook page Moth.
Hassium by Anca B.