From static oblivion From static oblivion From static oblivion From static oblivion

Ion Grigorescu

From static oblivion

Avarie, Paris — 2016
SFr. 46.00
Pages: 216
Edition: signed
Dimensions: 30 x 16 cm
Language: English/Romanian
ISBN: 9782954197425

From static oblivion traces, with circular, nearly spiral movements, the progression, both expansive and inclusive, of Grigorescu’s work, which, starting from the intimacy of a room or a kitchen, opens itself up to the structure of a house with its inhabitants or to the architecture of an entire city with its population, while moving through the urban transformations of a strongly rural and traditional Romania, in order to return and inscribe itself into the space of the body and into that of the world, in a complete superimposition (or indeed doubling) of micro and macrocosm. By enlarging his own field of vision, Grigorescu in effect circumscribes and simultaneously absorbs elements of his surrounding reality, showing us a continuity between art and life which translates itself, inside the frame of an image, into an interplay between work and work space or space of daily experience: Grigorescu’s act of dissidence is not an outcry of provocation, nor is it extreme or ostentatious; it is an anti-aesthetic operation which uses experimentation and rough or limited techniques to uncover the fiction of art and to denounce the artifice of representation, leaving us with the ambiguity between truth and falsehood, not only within the process of creation, but also within society. There is no trespass, Grigorescu’s performances are part of an ongoing and “contained” interrogation of the relationship between the body and the space which the book is trying to match with the choice of its images whose measured surface tries to “keep inside” all that’s possible: the composition appears dense yet fluid, “cursive”, though never imposing.

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