Portfolio: Ion Zupcu

by Beth E. Wilson, January 25, 2008

Visitors to Ion Zupcu’s home and studio in Hopewell Junction are greeted by a series of intimate portraits of Zupcu’s daughter Christina—a series he began when she was four, interrupted by his emigration to the US from Romania in 1991, but which became an annual ritual when she rejoined him here at age 11. The careful attention to detail, immaculate gelatin-silver printing, and very organized, aesthetically sensitive approach to his subject evident in this series are qualities that carry over to all of his fine art work as well, including his most recent series, Works on Paper.

Inspired by the paper models Christina was making a few years ago in her architectural studies, Zupcu began photographing tiny, carefully folded and lit bits of paper—the largest actual subject is no more than one inch across—using his square-format Hasselblad camera. Enlarged to 15-by-15-inch prints, the play of light and shadow in these images takes on an unexpected power, creating abstractions that at times seem like the photographic rival of the slashed canvases of Lucio Fontana.

This newest series of Zupcu’s work has now been published by Park Island Press in a beautifully produced book, Ion Zupcu: Works on Paper, which is available at the Merritt Bookstores, or through the photographer’s website, www.ionzupcu.ro. As this goes to press, Clamp Art gallery is planning a solo show of his work in New York City, set to open in late March.
—Beth E. Wilson

Ion Zupcu on his work
Drawn to the square
I use photography to express my drawings. I don’t have any knowledge about painting, and I don’t know how to make big drawings, so what I was doing was very small drawings, just trying to get down the masses, get to an idea about how just a simple line will respond within a square, based on the format of my camera. I use photography to give life to that drawing. It’s not what we all know about photography; it’s a bit different.
If you try the spiral [one of the images in the book], starting from other parts of the square, it’s not going to end up as beautiful as from there. The square is a very challenging format. It’s a very balanced size. Whatever you put within the square, there are other forces that you have to fight. Don’t get it too balanced, or formal, which I’ve been told I was [doing] at one point. I’ve had many fights with the square.

Works on paper
Two of my galleries helped [in] producing the book. One of them just kept asking that I should have a book of my works on paper. At that point, the first half was already done, and then I did the design for the book, and realized there weren’t that many photographs for it, just 20 images.
I knew that I had about six months in front of me, and I decided to do another body of work based on works on paper, too. I made a schedule of my life: every day, from 8 to 12 or 1, I was to be in the studio and just shoot. From 1 to 5 I was doing drawings, from 5 to later that night I was processing the film. So after six months, I came up with 20 images [to add to the book]. [The second series of photographs are] a response to great artists, whose work I admire. For example, [pointing to the image Woman in his book], this is a response to Willem de Kooning’s Women. I cannot reproduce the ugly woman, but at least I can use the title and respond to that title differently.