Ion Grigorescu
Romania of the 1970s, in which Ion Grigorescu starts his highly original and unexpected endeavor, is a world of complex and almost ubiquitous trauma. The ideological opening at the end of the 60s—beginning of the 70s is replaced by a new path towards enclosure, this time under a new ideological frame combining mythical and isolationist nationalism with the imperatives of total and radical modernization. Simultaneously, the hierarchical social oppression, based on the model of a leadership controlling the victimized masses is refined by a horizontal form of surveillance coming from inside—
the informers reporting their pairs. In this context, of an enclosed, fractured and shifting society, in which uncertainty ranges from cultural models and ideology to inter-human relations, Grigorescu comes with his fascinating artistic responses articulated in a very personal aesthetic universe. Despite their variety and relative fragmentation, the intellectual sources of his work (the conceptual art of the 70s—which he managed to access in the short period of the country’s opening,—psychoanalytical theory, Romanian spiritual tradition, etc.) are thoroughly integrated, explored and questioned by his creative and utterly free spirit. With a high availability to formal experiment, Grigorescu observes and signifies into his particular analytical system virtually all the aspects of reality, from the limits of his own corporality to the disintegration of the society surrounding him, from the material effects of this chaos—manifested in the urban and social structure of his city—to metaphysics. C.C.
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