I was born in Communist Romania. I remember the revolution of 1989; Ceaucescu and his wife assassinated live on TV, bread lines, the laughter of my father as communism fell, the sadness of my grandfather, my grandmother's kitchen, her hands... Those memories seem almost like dreams these days. I have been tapping further into these reminiscences as I get older. I am deeply searching my Romanian past and my connection with this historically rich place I left when I was ten. Upon a visit to the Museum of the Peasant in Bucharest around 2015, I stumbled upon a room of wooden folk chairs from the 1900s, they stood out like a quiet classroom of silent witnesses. I was so moved by their abstract anthropomorphic quality and their timeless simplicity. A lot of things changed after that visit.
My “Folks” chairs series came very spontaneously shortly after my steel furniture pieces. My steel works are worked out through many layers and processes but my Folks chairs are fast, rough and punk.

They are usually made from discarded material laying around the studio and bandaged together with the negative cut out pieces of the steel pieces. They grow as I build them and I never plan them. Trance and spontaneity guides them into being.
The characters that appear in them are maybe the characters I remember as the happy and sometimes sad memories of my childhood. - Serban Ionescu, 2021