Outside, there is no trace of life. A blitzkrieg of subzero temperatures, snow, and ice has turned Little Village, a southwest-side Chicago neighborhood, into an urban tundra.
“Well?” Leo steps back. He’s about five yards from the six-by-six-foot canvas, which towers over him. (Earlier Leo’s mother had helped him lower the painting onto the floor so he could reach the top.) Leo has one foot up on a folding chair, while his cat Tiger coils around the other. A plump boy with a cherublike face, he has hand prints and other splotches of paint all over his tattered sweater. Mississippi Heat, his favorite blues band, is wailing away on the CD player.
“Nah,” Leo says.
Late in 1985 Adrian Ionita, a prize-winning graduate of Romania’s elite Nicolae Grigorescu Institute of Art, was invited to participate in Forma Viva, an international sculptors’ symposium in Slovenia. He accepted, and he and his wife traveled there from their home in Timisoara.
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Gorbachev had just come to power; hard-line communists ruled the Soviet Union. Terms like glasnost and perestroika were barely whispered. In the Socialist Republic of Romania, President Nicolae Ceausescu–who three years later would be executed for crimes of genocide–ruled with an oppressive hand. To speak out against communism almost certainly meant death.
But Adrian was able to complete only part of his sculpture. After he talked to a Slovenian reporter, the reporter wrote about Vera Mukhina’s meaning in “a big publication.” Before Adrian was able to carve the hammer, he had to stop sculpting–as soon as the story was printed, he knew he was a “sitting duck.”
When Adrian is sharing his history, though, he frequently yanks his mind from wherever it goes to get those memories, and he violently interjects, “But this is not important, my time is gone. Now attention should be on Leo.” He punctuates almost every sentence by saying that his tales will not provide any insight into his son’s wonderfully bizarre paintings.
