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91 91 Art commentary by GABRIELLA SONABEND 91 at THE GALLERY OF EVERYTHING Portrait by ALEXANDRU PAUL Tiny cowboys by CARMEN LIDIA VIDU from the series ION BARLADEANU, MY COWBOY ION BÂRLĀDEANU Words by LUCY NURNBERG with translations by FLAVIA YASIN 92 93 92 93 92 MAN, MYTH, LEGEND 93 Nicolaescu Te story of how Ion Barladeanu, the Romanian unpaid extras, this collage artist and pseudo flm director, went from down-and-out to world famous. STARRING DAN POPESCU, CURATOR and ION BARLADEANU, ARTIST BUCHAREST, ROMANIA — Te frst thing to know about Ion Barladeanu’s collages is that they lm, which was directed by Sergiu f are flm stills. Assembled in widescreen, his scenes of spaghetti westerns, spy thrillers and war epics e T feature legends of the silver screen — Roger Moore, Sophia Loren, Jean-Paul Belmondo and Brigitte . Bardot among them — alongside the corrupt politicians of communist-era Romania. Ion began cutting and pasting his cinema-inspired collages in the 1970s, when Romania was under the oppressive rule of Nicolae Ceaușescu. He worked on them in secret; the satirical content lm-makers, including Steven Spielberg, who referenced in it f was so radically subversive that their discovery could have landed him in prison. Later, following the overthrow of Ceaușescu in 1989 and the dawn of a new capitalist era, Ion ended up homeless. Only in 2007, after Ion was discovered by the gallery owner Dan Popescu, did his surrealist artworks fnally see Michael Brave the the light of day. Ion grew up in Zapodeni, a rural region of Romania close to Moldova — “He has a very strong, very Moldovan, sense of humour. Tat’s where the dada in his work comes from,” Dan explains. Ion’s uenced numerous father was a member of the agricultura nomenklatura in the region, overseeing the production on the f state-owned land. But Ion didn’t like his father, and he left home for Bucharest at 18, making a living doing the jobs no one else wanted. “He had a lifestyle like Charles Bukowski,” says Dan. Ion worked in turn as a dockworker, a lm and in f stonecutter and a gravedigger — “he did all the work in the world” — refusing to take part in the socialist workforce. He sometimes worked illegally on the black market; at one point in the early 1980s he was caught working as an undertaker with no papers, and spent three months in jail. In the late 1970s, Ion began making collages, without any understanding of the history of the medium. For many years he had been developing his drawing technique, and eventually he began corruption and oppression. supplementing these illustrations with photomontages created from magazine cuttings. “I’d cut out Florin Piersic, Alain Delon and Sophia Loren,” Ion remembers. “Having so many issues of Cinéma magazine, I frst made a caricature, then started putting hats on the characters. Afterwards, I cut out [the Romanian actor] Mircea Albulescu’s head. I tried to see how he would look as president of Romania. It was too funny, the tricolor fag, with Nicolae Ceaușescu’s club…” Ion was obsessed with movies. During the communist era, cinema was a form of escape — a window on a free world. He went to the movies regularly, often two or three times a week. He dreamt of being a director and began creating cut-and-paste scenes, using magazine clippings to cast big-name actors alongside the country’s corrupt politicians. Ion sourced his materials from contraband magazines, mostly French, bought on the black market or found in rubbish dumps. “Tat’s how it was under socialism, when the comrade Nicolae Ceaușescu was the country’s prince. Ten he tore down buildings and I would fnd pictures in basements, underground. You can still fnd them lying around, even nowadays. Tey throw them away in those . Piersic was a working-class really who Ion hero admired, representing work and is he seen the in Ion’s everyday lots of man triumphing against huge bins that say paper, metal, iron, bottles.” patriotic historical celebrates epic the story Prince of Michael uniting Romania against the Ottoman Empire. Te ephemeral nature of the medium was not lost on Ion: “I’ve already got 500 kg of waste material. When I’m dead, they will all end up in the landfll. I’m only sorry I couldn’t make a school for collage- makers. Teach them how to cut out. It’s very easy.” In his early works Ion pasted his actors and objects over hand-drawn backgrounds of living rooms, lm produced under the communist regime and remains the country’s most ambitious production. Funded by the state, and with thousand of beaches or street scenes. His technique developed rapidly around 1985, when he began selecting f backgrounds from magazine pages or calendars. Tis method enabled him to fully realise his cinematic scenes, but presented a new set of challenges. As Dan explains: “When you have a background that E.T. the Extra the Terrestrial E.T. helps diferentiate the light, the chromatics and the shades… it’s much more difcult to integrate the persons or the objects than if you make the background yourself.” Where Ion’s early works lm was released was it a national duty is watch the to It best-known it. Romanian were grotesque, with a focus on the surreal characters and objects in the foreground, later works are f conceived with a far greater sense of reality. One of the things that makes Ion unique in collage is his meticulous eye for lighting — in a single composition subjects are lit from a single angle, just as on an authentic flm set. And having never seen in 1970, wasin 1970, the largest untitled, — In this 1982 still, Florin Piersic, the Romanian Brad Pitt the of 1980s, is pasted a battle into scene from When this work by other artists of the medium, Ion broke many of the accepted rules of collage. the director’s cut of 95 94 “Tere is a specifc style Ion used,” Dan says. “Other artists work in a very modernist, fat 95 94 way. Tere’s no depth and only a single layer. Ion didn’t know about the history of collage or the 95 94 professional, academic way to make them. He needed layers to create his movies, so that’s why you see lm-maker, f two or three layers and depth. It’s funny him not knowing it was taboo. He just did it, and something spectacular came out of it.” c as a As a pseudo director, Ion found the selecting of disparate parts was the biggest challenge in creating f a scene: “If you’re a director, you have to place your actors in the foreground, space them apart, throw in a helicopter here, a plane there, an Obama kissing his Obama-lass.” Side note: “He was an OK president.” In 1989, after the revolution, Ion had nowhere to go. Dan explains: “If you had been living in a fat in communist times, you were given the opportunity to buy it. But Ion was in and out of work, and he was drinking. It wasn’t possible for him. And the guys that were living in that block of fats, they took advantage of this and threw him out.” Without anywhere to live, Ion stopped making collages altogether. He was without a fxed address for more than a decade. He survived on the streets for six years, before taking refuge in a room (with electricity, but no heating) in the basement of a Bucharest apartment block, near the communal bins. Here, in 2007, he was discovered by Ovidiu Feneș, an artist represented by Dan Popescu’s H’art Gallery. “Tis artist made three-dimensional assemblages and he was always going to places where they discard objects to collect items for his work,” Dan says. “He found Ion there, living in the building courtyard, with his artwork hidden away in suitcases. “It was a Saturday on December 1, Romania’s national day, and Ovidiu came to me and said, ‘You have to come and see this guy, he’s amazing.’” Dan followed him and stayed for three hours. He knew he had discovered someone extraordinary. “I was like a patron. Te idea that he isn’t even self-aware of what he is doing, but everything is in place. It’s the perfect proof that art can exist anywhere, even without a very focused or rational intentionality. Sometimes it happens in a man — he just needs a little focus and a certain obsession. And it doesn’t need all sorts of means, just scissors and glue and some magazines.” Te next day, having made a discovery he knew would be the most signifcant of his career, Dan returned to his gallery to fnd there was a major problem with the plumbing. “I was sitting there and, all of a sudden, shit began coming out of the sink.” Something was blocking the pipes and the entire building’s waste was being diverted to his gallery on the ground foor. As it was a Sunday, the day after tting him for be to spotlit in his underwear. Pavelescu, the on other hand, was a much of more a national holiday, no one was working. “I phoned the plumbers and they said, ‘OK, we are coming, f but frst thing tomorrow.’ So I had to take buckets and buckets of the building’s waste out of the bathroom. And the only thing keeping me going was the thought that, OK, there’s a balance in the world — you discovered this guy, but to qualify, somehow, you have to pass through all the shit and piss and garbage that he passed in his whole life, in the course of a single day.” It took three weeks for Dan to convince Ion to sign with him, but eventually the artist agreed that they should put on an exhibition together.

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