124 Vladlen Babcinetchi: The Birth of an Artist

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
Owl 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
 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
Dame 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
Nude 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, Legs
126 Vladlen Babcinetchi: The Birth of an Artist

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
Christ
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. Crucifixion
Made after Messiah's Image, Vladlen’s
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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
Ion Murgescu 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 Mircea Ispir
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
128 Vladlen Babcinetchi: The Birth of an Artist

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.