IONEL TALPAZAN

Talpazan was born in the Romanian commune of Petrachioaia. His parents sold him to another couple when he was a baby, and his upbringing thereafter in the village of Maineasca remained unhappy. His foster mother drank heavily, and there were regular beatings. When he was eight years old, hiding outside the house to escape one such punishment, a “beautiful blue light of energy” descended from the sky. After enveloping him briefly, it disappeared, leaving him convinced of its extraterrestrial origins.

Four years later, he began to draw what he had witnessed. It was the start of a collection that would eventually comprise more than 1,000 artworks. Some were meticulous diagrams of the UFOs’ inner workings, each individual segment filled in with a different colour. Others were positively psychedelic, patterned with swirling dots and eye-like nebulæ. Talpazan would often inscribe his own notes and theories around the edges of an image or right across the surface, using an almost indecipherable hybrid of Romanian and English.

In 1987, he fled Ceausescu’s Romania by swimming across the Danube to Yugoslavia, and settled in New York after being granted political asylum. At times he lived and worked on the street; for a while he lived in a cardboard box near Columbus Circle. As his fortunes improved, his one-room flat in Harlem filled up with artwork. His repertoire expanded to include smooth plaster sculptures, a little wider than a frisbee, painted silver or blue, then outfitted with brightly coloured portholes and exhaust pipes and mounted on blue pedestals made from scavenged parts. Their purpose was always meant to be instructive as well as creative. Talpazan maintained