Artist As Astronaut: The Otherworldly Art Of Ionel Talpazan
Dr. Daniel Wojcik
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I have to believe that for Talpazan these drawings were a kind of therapy. All art making is, in a way, and I suspect for him there was a kind of healing that was going on as these stained-glass spaceships poured out of him. I suspect, like many who have found and experienced a vision, he may have sensed that these works exerted a calming and healing effect on others as well. They certainly have for me . . . His are spiritual drawings. Guidemarkers. Tools.
— David Byrne, musician and artist
The reality of UFOs is beside the point; here, it was overshadowed by the evidence of Talpazan’s urgent creative process . . . I was stunned by the spectacular obsession of his work, which seemed to convert the dirty streets of New York City into a museum of the cosmos.
— Tony Oursler, artist
Artist as Astronaut: The Otherworldly Art of Ionel Talpazan is a vibrant collection of artworks by, and interviews with, the visionary artist Ionel Talpazan.
Artist as Astronaut will contain nearly 200 full colour images of Talpazan's work, many never seen before, alongside personal archival photographs and ephemera, and essays by artists and art historians, including David Byrne, Tony Oursler, Valérie Rousseau, David Tibet, and Terry Winters.
In the early 1960s, after a terrible beating by his foster mother outside their home in rural Romania, the young Ionel Talpazan had a life-transforming vision of a mysterious “beautiful blue light of energy” that he later believed to be of extraterrestrial origin. Four years after his experience, he began obsessively drawing otherworldly vehicles and celestial energies. In 1987, he made a daring escape from Ceaușescu’s regime in Romania, swimming the Danube River to Yugoslavia where he was imprisoned and sent to a refugee camp. He was eventually granted political asylum in New York City, where he struggled to survive by selling his art on the streets of Manhattan.
Talpazan said that he “sacrificed his life to the UFO” and his ultimate goal was to reveal the mysterious technology and hidden meanings of flying saucers as vehicles of salvation and transcendence. He experimented with a wide range of materials and techniques, from sculptures and paintings to detailed, diagrammatic depictions of spaceships and their propulsion systems.
He produced hundreds of works during his lifetime and asserted that his images possessed a scientific as well as artistic value. Despite adversity and poverty, Talpazan's impulse to create was relentless, ending only with his death in 2015.
This is a remarkable story of the refugee experience, one of survival, resilience, and the transformative power of art. Talpazan’s work has now achieved international acclaim and has entered important collections and museums throughout the world, including the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Collection of l'Art Brut in Lausanne, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the American Visionary Art Museum, the Museum of Everything, and the American Folk Art Museum.
Professor and scholar Daniel Wojcik spent more than a decade interviewing Talpazan and documenting his artistic vision. This book is the culmination of his research and unprecedented access to this truly otherworldly artist. In addition to Wojcik’s in-depth essay, the volume contains nearly 200 colour images of Talpazan’s work, many never been seen before, and features texts by artists and art historians David Byrne, Robert Cozzolino, Edward M. Gómez, Tony Oursler, Valérie Rousseau, David Tibet, Leslie Umberger, and Terry Winters.
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About the author
Dr. Daniel Wojcik has published widely on the topics of visionary culture, art and trauma, subcultures, and alternative spiritualities. He is the author of Outsider Art: Visionary Worlds and Trauma, The End of the World As We Know It: Faith, Fatalism, and Apocalypse in America, Punk and Neo-Tribal Body Art, and Exploring Anthropology through Folklore and Mythology. He is also a regular contributor to magazines and journals on the topics of visionary art, music, culture, and new religious movements.
