Thursday, October 9, 2025 at 8:00 PM to 10:30 PM
2220 Arts + Archives, Los Angeles
Lightstruck presents an evening of transcendent animation by Romanian visionary painter, Sabin Bălașa. Working in a self-described style of cosmic romanticism, Bălașa’s hypnotically expressive and textural “animated painting films” exist in a universe all their own, alive with alien lifeforms and ethereal landscapes which elegantly delve into the complex philosophical and psycho-social dramas of our modern world. Prepare to be transported to a celestial realm of ecstatic consciousness, beyond language, space, and time. Fiercely independent, poetically minded, and spiritually charged, Sabin Bălașa consistently forged his own path, rejecting the commercial limitations of a fickle art world, devoted to his ever-evolving artistic practices. Showing remarkable talent from an early age, Bălașa studied fine art in Bucharest and Italy through the ‘50s and ‘60s and became known for his evocative and metaphorical surrealist paintings. Always fascinated by the language of film and the rich storytelling traditions of his culture, Bălașa embraced animation for a relatively short period of his career, creating nine laboriously hand-painted films between 1966 and 1979. Bălașa’s films, like his paintings, possess a mystical, uneasy, otherworldly quality, laden with symbolism and motion that undulates like a fever-dreamt fairy tale. Beneath their elements of fantasy and lore, his expressive animations serve as contemporary criticisms of oppressive socio-political systems, tyrannical patriarchy, and passive consumerism, while always balanced with a pure love for humanity and belief in the capacity of art as a vital tool for empathy, connection, and spiritual growth. Ever eclipsing expectation and defying conformity, Bălașa rejected the concept of animation as caricature, enabling an evolution of his highly trained brush and far out imagination to sequentially activate his canvas, generating something entirely unique, timeless, metaphysical, and divine. With the collaboration of his son, Tudor Bălașa, we are overjoyed to present this retrospective program of all nine of Sabin Bălașa’s animated films, including Return to the Future, a politically controversial masterwork from 1971, reunited with its long-absent original score by Alvin Curran, which Lightstruck was thrilled to assist in recovering with thanks to Cineteca di Bologna. Program by Mark Toscano and Zena Grey. Notes by Zena Grey. Extra special thanks to Tudor Bălașa. With gratitude to Andrea Meneghelli at Cineteca di Bologna.