Learning the material.
At fourteen, Vlasceanu entered the workshop where his father worked as a welder. The shipyards of the Danube were his first education in metal. He learned its resistance and its response to heat before he had entered a museum.
He left Romania for Marseille in 1991 and spent eight years working in ship repair. The tools, processes and physical understanding acquired there remain central to his practice.
A different way of seeing.
At thirty, he stepped into a gallery to shelter from the rain. That encounter with contemporary art marked a change in direction. Steel, already familiar through years of industrial work, became the material through which he could explore an image, a space and the person looking at it.
Heat, tension, patience.
He shapes sheets of stainless steel through internal stress, heating and rapid cooling, allowing the material to find its curve. Polishing follows at a slower pace, with weeks of work by hand.
The resulting surface does not return a fixed likeness. It stretches or doubles the viewer’s image, and can allow it to disappear as the viewer changes position. Movement belongs to the encounter with the object as much as to its form.
Between polish and grain.
His series include Eau Noire, Neuf Visages and Sans Personne. In Sans Personne, brushed areas interrupt the mirror polish. The reflected image becomes less distinct, or is absorbed by the surface.
He calls his pieces objects. Their presence is direct, but the view they hold is never entirely stable.
