Serban Ionescu
Peter Sellers Chair, 2018
47" x 18" x 19"
Powder coated steel
“With his drawings in space, Serban Ionescu blurs the boundary between design and sculpture into a line one can inhabit. Ionescu’s work stems primarily from the automatic act of drawing. These instinct based gestures leave the artist with piles of drawings to sift through and further decipher into collages. Cartoonish limbs are pasted together to create a greater anthropomorphic form, flattening on the XY axis to take on the function of a chair. The finished figure is translated into three dimensional space via several methods such as CNC water jet or plasma cut steel, powder coating, and sometimes upholstery. Every aspect of Ionescu’s drawings are captured into the sculptural work, from the loose edge mark-making to the vibrant pops of color. Limbs are emphasized as shaky, creeping, and slanted entities that ground these constructs into being. Building upon the concept that a chair is a character or a pet in a room, these cast of characters poetically collapse air into earth, and gesture into chair.”