Vladimir Ivaneanu - Plus One Collective
Vladimir Ivaneanu
Belgium
Designer biography:
Vladimir Ivaneanu (°1977, Gent, B) studied Printmaking at WENK, Sint-Lucas in Ghent and developed there his passion for relief print. In 2007 he was selected for the Nagasawa Art Park Project in Japan where he learned the technics of Japanese woodcut. In 2010 he got the opportunity to become a teacher at the Printmaking studio of the Academie voor Beeldende Kunst of the city of Ghent. Together with his colleagues Vladimir is researching how the traditional printmaking technics and products can be innovated with new materials and technologies so printmaking becomes more sustainable and less toxic to the environment and to those working with this medium. In this team Vladimir is specialist in Western and Japanese woodcut, chine collé and risography. Since 2014 Vladimir also teaches the history of traditional printmaking and illustration technics and the history of illustration at the Plantin Institute for Typography in Antwerp. In his own artistic work Vladimir had, beside printmaking, always an interest in miniature painting and the thin dividing line between applied and fine arts. Since 2018 thanks to several collaborations with Ingrid Adriaenssens he started to experiment with enamel as an interesting medium on the edge between jewelry art and miniature painting.
Collection concept:
Since the end of my art studies my work has been mainly influenced by the famous Shakespearean expression “All the world is a stage and men and women merely players”. As the son of a Romanian set designer and a Flemish teacher I got in touch with theater at a very early age but soon felt the urge to do something different in my own work, not so much because theater didn’t interest me but mainly because I wanted to distance myself from my father. You know, that Freudian thing.
So, I approached theater rather from a philosophical and meta point of view and thus theater became in my work a metaphor for our daily life activities and how we behave in our personal theater play called life. In my work the border between theater and daily life, actor and human being gets blurry, and the definitions of reality and art get questioned. I am particularly interested in the fact that it can be very difficult to distinguish reality from theater or as the philosopher Roland Barthes would state: the natural from the constructed.
In my latest works the emphasis slightly shifted to the mechanics theater players use to construct their persona, identity. A process I relate to as the son of parents with 2 different cultural backgrounds. In this perspective my new works can be seen as research to how the Romanian and Flemish blood that runs through my veins shapes me into the person and artist I am.
“Death’s favorite game”, pendant, enamel on red copper, 2022
“L’idole”, brooch/ pin, enamel on red copper, 2020