“I had this concept, learn how to paint Renaissance photographs however to make them look up to date,” says Remus Grecu. “To make Renaissance work really feel virtually like AI snapshots.”
For his debut solo exhibition at BEERS, Romanian painter Remus Grecu presents The Silence Between, a piece that presents an idealized model of the world primarily based as a lot in Renaissance portray because the digital age and concepts of a utopian future.
Taking its title from G.W. Leibniz’ Theodicy, a treatise about good and evil written in 1710 by which the thinker argues that the precise world is the perfect of all attainable worlds. For Grecu, this notion is utilized to artwork – whereby at present’s up to date artists have the best breadth, entry, and ubiquity to visible illustration within the historical past of artwork. For Grecu, visible tropes like these seen throughout Renaissance painters (he attributes Lotto and Ghrirlandaio as two significantly influential artists after a latest journey to Rome) but in addition how concepts turn into diminished and repeated over time. He feedback on AI imagery and ChatGPT the place the historical past of visible illustration and even the artist’s work is in some way flattened right into a sequence of repeated motifs or concepts.
For example, if we ask AI to explain “An Previous Man and His Grandson” by Domenico Ghirlandaio, the phrases that come up would possibly then be in comparison with an outline of tropes throughout another media, and this has, in a method, knowledgeable Grecu’s observe. Wanting on the historical past of artwork versus up to date artwork, we see how sure patterns, motifs, or genres kind of…rise to the floor. As an alternative of hiding from this, Grecu leans into the patterns and taking them even a step additional. His variations of historic tropes appear much more futurized, extra idealized, extra superficial.
Recurrent to every portray is a feminine determine, one who appears to be one thing of a hyper-stylized Victorian period heroines – as more likely to be Jane Eyre or a reanimated Emma Stone in Poor Issues – she is in truth Cunégonde, the heroine of Voltaire’s Candide, symbolizing the fleeting great thing about youth and the impermanence of life. However she could as properly be a modern-day Mona Lisa, introduced earlier than a tableau of draped, richly colored silks that recall Davíd or Veronese, virtually as a lot as they pull from the psychedelic, distant interplanetary landscapes described so vividly in late-era C.S. Lewis, or the off-kilter (sur)realities presently served up by. However Grecu’s fantastical worlds have been introduced to vivid realization together with his meticulous painterly fashion, his unabashed and sumptuous use of saturated color, and a presentation of ripe and rotund fruits that appear to spill and tumble from the painted floor.
What all this discuss tends to miss, nevertheless, is the uncooked talent it takes to make such commentary really feel easy. The painterly prowess that so few artists really possess essential to make such complicit or subversive critique really feel pure. As a result of on one other degree, the wonder in Grecu’s work is kind of merely how lush and luxuriant his worlds, colors, and figures come throughout. And the way we, as viewers, ought to relish within the “very best imaginative and prescient” of a world introduced right here.
In line with Grecu: “In spite of everything, the principle thought of this new sequence of work is to be like an opposition to the imperfect world we dwell in, a world striked by wars and struggling, with corrupt politicians and so many different terrible issues that occur on this planet.
I wished my work to be photographs crammed with happiness, with stunning colours and unreal ambiance, with no sad stains in them, and as I mentioned, to be an opposition to the madness that takes place in our imperfect world.”
