Vladlen Babcinetchi: The Birth of an Artist 124

Cristian UNGUREANU Constanta, ROMANIA

Vladlen Babcinetchi: The Birth of an Artist

Like other major traditional arts, contemporary sculpture has become, in the third millennium of Post-Christ civilisation, a place where one can meet a great diversity of directions and artistic pursuits. The communication and digital transfer of data and information has favoured the influences and creative substances transfer from areas that never constituted the convenience subject for the posterity of Phidias and Michelangelo, until half a century ago. At

the same time millenary practices and procedures, specific to sculpture art, developed a process of exuberant expansion. Many contemporary architectures, for instance, have developed new functions, beyond the traditional aesthetic and utilitarian ones: they become enormous iron, concrete and glass sculptures. In this climate of artistic globalisation, of aesthetic and industrial amalgamation, of the political with the social, of the holy and the profane, of ancient mythology with the hyper-sophisticated urban mythology from west, against the pauperization in the second and the third world, the birth of a genuine artist is a burgeon of a lion’s foot.

By the end of the 90s one talked about the dependence between the number of the really valuable artists and the independent constant of their external appearance and of the degree of recognition that they offer.

Vladlen Babcinetchi was born next to the eastern limit of Eminescu’s doina, on the Dnestr Moldavian shore. After a childhood marked by the fantastic dimension of his homeland he became a student at the “Octav Bancila” Art High school in Iasi. A sculptor, artist and an

Owl

Cristian UNGUREANU 125

arts pedagogue of the school saw in him an creative potential able to understand the clay, the stone and the wood, which cannot be approached by any master of a strong tri-dimensional vision. Modern techniques of disjoint and rock casting as well as the access to the compositional secrets of each artist from the Paleolithic until today made from Vladlen an already complex artist. He refuses to accept only the acknowledged artistic values as eternal; nor does he accept the assumed anti-aesthetically abuse of the contemporary installation artists who are followers of the megalithic sculpture.

Frequent themes of the vibrant acute consciousness of the young artist, who found a perfect setting in the mysterious city of Iasi point at the eternal questions: birth and death, faith, love, the perpetually overwhelming beauty of the human body. He perfectly resonates with harmony with all the other structures of the universe, from the molecular composition of the oldest rocks to the grass filament or the most faraway constellation. A cheerful nature, filled with energy that reminds one of the Moldavian yeomen who valiantly confronted the Tartar hordes, Vladen covered in a state

of lucid wonder the Moscow and Petersburg museum. He explored the destiny of colour and form, as alchemists of Western Europe did and the more recent abstruse purity of the perfect geometry of the American heralds. The sublimated metaphysical anxiety from the dark intensity of his homeland made him look up at the work of the great spirit of Brancusi.

The feminine features and body have become an obsession for Vladlen, a fount of inspiration. The central theme of his graduation degree project,

Dame

Nude

Legs

Vladlen Babcinetchi: The Birth of an Artist 126

which he defended with professionalism in the summer of 2006, as a graduate of the University of Arts "George Enescu" in Iasi, where he specialized in sculpture under the intensive generous guiding of Ilie Bostan, la lecturer and PhD holder. Then the eternally feminine became, at an impressive conceptual level, the main theme of the master in plastic arts within the same University.

In the deep solitude of his journeys on the ocean of sculpture, Vladlen opens himself to sincere and spontaneous communication. This is how he approaches the technical procedure and the extremely diversified techniques, in order to master what he considers to be useful as the matter transfiguration in a work of art. The artwork assigns this status only when it counters the third principle of thermodynamics and gives birth to more energy than needed for its created. He accomplished several bas relief collections, medallions in the style of Antiquity. His subject is personalities of Romanian history, portraits deeply impregnated in the Romanian common subconscious. Vladlen approached his models with courage and technical ability, never leaving room for light vanity common to some modern sculptors or to our contemporaries who find this measure anachronic. Genuinely modest, Vladlen already knows that any subject can become, in the post-modernist key, an arch to the high and great purity spaces of art. Even if he is not in possession of an unique stylistic and critically regulated formula, the fact that he knows that is not an absolute and general valid necessity in the new age of technology, Vladlen Babcinetchi works in clay, rock, welded metal and reinforced concrete shaped in forms, searching to intercept the moment of infinite mystery of Jesus’s sacrifice on the cross. Many models of the crucifixions that he made remind one of the great masters of the Renaissance sculpture and bas relief. Made after Messiah's Image, Vladlen’s

Christ

Crucifixion

Cristian UNGUREANU 127

sculpturea originate in the Russian monography from the olden age (the 14-15 centuries). Despite his young age, Vladlen does not hesitate to elaborate some abstract synthesis of the shapes, stressing his geometrized analysis through the intrinsic plastic structures value that materiality generous offers. Chalkstone - speaks an ancestral language of the times when people did not yet leave the earthly paradise. Wood - is left in the torsos or faces chopped by Vladlen, to reveal their origin, beauty and age. He already cherishes a strong belief that art must describe the mystery of life without draining it, that art is not an education phenomena, elitist or background.

He has always linked shapes magnetically with other shapes, the sculpture's plastic methods, but that did not deter him from achieving some pictorial experience, which denotes a potential sensitivity that could impel him anytime in a bi-dimensional chromatic project. His portraits, greatly expressive in colour, are a replica of the stone or founded plaster busts that announce him as an exceptional portraitist (examples: Mihai Eminescu, Mircea Ispir, Ion Murgescu).

The natural moments of suspense gain a from the

severe correct modelling of the major features that define a portrait character as an acknowledgement of his desire to get to the hidden depth soul and of character. The bust of Eminescu and the reliefs of historic personalities, of philosophers are rapturous but lucid exercises to capture the personalities’ inner energy and to transpose them into the visual. The multiple themes and technical methods that Vladlen attempted with art and passion during the last years make me state that we can see an artist's profile who has no fear or risk and who is ready to love art, pure and unselfish, in the middle of which he had the privilege to be born. Even if his sculptural visions will move to forms, expression methods and concepts that nobody yet knows, we will always experience the

Mircea Ispir

Ion Murgescu

Vladlen Babcinetchi: The Birth of an Artist 128

stamp of millenary classic sculpture rules, of the sinuously geometry of the feminine body and of the homeland where there still can be heard the alphorns voice.