from The New York Times
by William Grimes
Ionel Talpazan, an outsider artist from Romania who sold his visionary works of U.F.O.s and life in outer space on the sidewalks of Manhattan before being discovered in the late 1980s, died on Sept. 21 in Manhattan. He was 60.
The cause was complications of a stroke and advanced diabetes, Aarne Anton, his dealer at the American Primitive Gallery in SoHo, said.
Mr. Talpazan claimed that one night in the Romanian countryside, when he was 8, a strange, hovering shape slowly descended from the sky, enveloping him in a celestial blue light, and then disappeared. The experience haunted him and became the source of his art.
His paintings, drawings and sculptures dealt, obsessively, with U.F.O.s and their inner workings, often shown in cross section and heavily annotated in Romanian.
He insisted that his work had value not only for art lovers but also for NASA scientists, since it articulated the magnetic forces and antimatter at work in the propulsion systems of his spaceships.
“My art is about the big mystery in life,” he told the journal Western Folklore in 2008. “How did we get here on planet Earth? Why are we here? Is there life on other planets?”
Ionel Talpazan (pronounced yah-NEL TAL-puh-zan) was born on Aug. 16, 1955, in the commune of Petrachioaia, Romania. After being given up by his parents, he was raised by foster parents in Maineasca, one of the commune’s four villages.
His close encounter with a U.F.O. occurred when, fearing a beating for misbehavior, he slipped out of his bedroom window in the middle of the night and walked out into the surrounding countryside, where he stood transfixed by what he called “a blue energy” radiating from a mysterious source overhead.
The incident left him confused, but also deeply interested in the idea of space travel, and he set about rendering his interplanetary visions, especially U.F.O.s, on paper. “I felt that by drawing them, I might penetrate their mystery,” he told The Independent of London in 1996.
He escaped from Romania, where he had worked in the construction trade, by swimming across the Danube to Yugoslavia in 1987. After several months living in a United Nations camp in Belgrade, he was granted political asylum by the United States and emigrated to New York.
A television documentary on U.F.O.s rekindled his interest in space, and he began drawing hypothetical interplanetary spacecraft. “He was interested not so much in aliens as in otherworldly technology,” said Daniel Wojcik, whose book “Outsider Art, Trauma and Visionary Worlds” will be published by the University Press of Mississippi next year. “He thought flying saucers would help bring about a better world by introducing a benevolent technology.”
In New York, Mr. Talpazan lived hand-to-mouth, at times sleeping in a cardboard box near Columbus Circle. He sold his work on the sidewalk, becoming a familiar sight at the entrance to the annual Outsider Art Fair, then held in the Puck Building in SoHo.
He was discovered by the art dealer Henry Tobler, known as Jay, who saw him selling work outside the Museum of Modern Art and wrote about him in 1990 in Folk Art Messenger, the journal of the Folk Art Society of America.
In the 1996 exhibition “Visions of Space & UFOs in Art,” at the American Primitive Gallery in Manhattan, more than a dozen of Mr. Talpazan’s works covered one wall, some of them bought by the artists Brice Marden and Terry Winters. The following year, at the same gallery, he was the subject of a solo show, “Ionel Talpazan: U.F.O.: Art & Science,” and at the Musée d’Art Brut in Neuilly-sur-Marne, France.
Mr. Talpazan rendered his U.F.O.s in various guises. Some adhered to an illustrational realism; others were abstract and heavily patterned like mandalas. Some works showed a single U.F.O. lifting off from an unidentified planet. Others showed multiple saucers engaged in battle or disappearing into a wormhole.
His titles were matter-of-fact yet otherworldly: “Red UFOs and the Statue of Liberty,” “Father and Son in Space,” “UFOs Over NYC.”
His U.F.O. sculptures, a little wider than a Frisbee, were made of plaster and painted silver or blue, then outfitted with brightly colored portholes and exhaust pipes and set on pedestals made from scavenged parts.
In the New Jersey newspaper The Star-Ledger in 1997, the critic Dan Bischoff wrote that they resembled “those old metal tops that you sent spinning by pushing a spiral rod down into the center, big and rounded and Art Deco-looking, like two hubcaps from a Studebaker stuck together.”
Mr. Talpazan’s work was exhibited at the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco and the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin.
In 2013, work by Mr. Talpazan was included in “The Alternative Guide to the Universe” at the Hayward Gallery in London and “Farfetched: Mad Science, Fringe Architecture and Visionary Engineering” at the Gregg Museum of Art and Design in Raleigh, N.C. This year he was part of the exhibition “Arstronomy” at La Casa Encendida in Madrid.
Mr. Talpazan, who lived in Harlem, is survived by two brothers and two sisters. About a year ago, on taking American citizenship, he legally changed his name to Adrian DaVinci.
“My art shows spiritual technology, something beautiful and beyond human imagination, that comes from another galaxy,” he told Western Folklore. “Something superior in intelligence and technology. So, in relative way, this is like the God. It is perfect.”
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