ION BARLADEANU, the prince of collages. At 63 years old, his secret collages prove an unlikely art world winner. From a poor life at the margins of society, Barladeanu becomes a worldwide artist, with admirors like Angelina Jolie, with exhibitions in the most important cultural centers like Paris and London. The movie made after his life, The world According to Ion B has won an Emmy International for Arts Programming 2010. Ion Barladeanu was a name unknown to the art world until very recently. Before 2008, the 63-year-old Romanian was eking out life on a grubby mattress at the bottom of a garbage chute in a Bucharest housing block. It is a world away from the surroundings in which he found himself last week, at the Anne de Villepoix gallery in Paris for a soirée privée, and not just any soirée privée. It was his own. On display at the gallery are collages created from discarded magazines that Barladeanu has rifled through for many years. It is a line of work, in fact, that he began before the fall of Nicolae Ceausescu in 1989. Created with a cinematographic edge, they depict shiny possibilities outside the gulag-like background in which he sets them. Its work that would have landed him in danger for many years. So he earned small pay packets through menial work as a grave digger and manual labourer, piecing his collages together in secret. It wasnt until 2007 that he showed them to another artist, who was also found scavenging through the rubbish. The fellow artist, in a cheering display of solidarity, called up a gallery owner to alert him to his find. The works are now on sale in Paris for around ?1,000 (Dh5000) each. Barladeanu now has a new flat and a new set of dentures. Last year, he was flown to Art Basel. In February, he was brought to Paris for the show, titled Realpolitik, and in the ultimate accolade for a burgeoning artist, surely, he had lunch with Angelina Jolie. One presumes that a Hollywood screenplay is being scribbled out this very second, starring Brad Pitt as the toothless vagabond. You can smell the Oscar already. Read more: thenational.ae/arts-culture/art/ion-barladeanu-inspiration-from-the-outside#ixzz3LQnFchOa Follow us: @TheNationalUAE on Twitter | thenational.ae on Facebook
Posted on: Tue, 09 Dec 2014 19:40:15 +0000
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