Ionel Talpazan

(Romania, 1955–2015)

Ionel Talpazan was raised by foster parents in a rural village in Romania. A childhood encounter with a swirling blue energy field led to a lifelong fascination with UFOs. After fleeing his native country and gaining political asylum in the US, he settled in New York in 1987, where he began making drawings and plaster models of UFOs. Talpazan estimates that he has created more than 1,000 works of art inspired by his visions and ideas about UFOs and their travel throughout the universe. His work illustrates in a singular and compelling way the archetypal aspects of UFOs as vehicles of inexplicable wonder, utopian technology and otherworldly salvation. Over the years Talpazan has experimented with a wide range of styles, techniques and new media. To illustrate his theories, he has developed a colour-coded system that delineates the energy sources used to propel spaceships. These include nuclear, anti-gravitational, solar, magnetic, anti-magnetic, metallurgical, gas, volcanic power, electromagnetic systems, among others. For these precise technical drawings he often combines crayon, ink, pencil, magic marker, watercolour and oil pastel to create illuminated, mandala-like flying machines that radiate halos of energy or vibrate with hallucinatory intensity. On the large pieces on which he writes his thoughts and theories, the words sometimes completely surround the image, almost like automatic writing. Talpazan considers the words to be as important as the images, stating that although his work has an artistic dimension, it is a combination of art and science.