Adrian Grecu
Adrian Grecu (b. 1969) is a Romanian artist, one of the pioneers of digital art in Romania. His first digital artwork dates back to 1993. In the decades that followed, he extensively used Computer Generated Image (CGI), 3D graphics, and animation software, his endeavors being reflected in articles and comments published in various cultural journals. His work has been featured in collective exhibitions and festivals in Japan, Poland, South Korea, USA, Belgium, etc., and was presented in personal exhibitions in Romania and in the USA.
In the recent years, the artist focuses on exploring the limits of the visual medium, the capabilities provided by technology and the expansion of the conceptual framework, working at the confluence between arts/ creativity and the latest technologies. Thus, his current artistic production includes Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) incorporated in complex, innovative sculptural installations, presented in a number of widely acclaimed exhibitions.
One of the artist’s trademarks are the sophisticated scenes with fantastic/dystopic themes defined by realistic textures and forms, elaborated entirely on the computer, without the use of photography, or other analog interventions. Rendered in 3D modeling techniques with the help of special software and successive filtering procedures, the works are presented as digital images on monitors, or printed in limited series on surfaces (paper, alubond, or canvas), each of them signed and numbered.
Adrian Grecu’s constant preoccupation for digitality has not distanced him from materiality and sculptural forms, most of his projects aiming to problematize the relationship and interaction between the material and the virtual world, between the real and the possible. His recent exhibition at the Museum of Art Cluj, in the summer of 2022, entitled Retroperspective. A digital manifesto, is relevant for this preoccupation. The project included series of CGI works and 3D animations from the 90’s until 2022 integrated in object- based installations. Not merely a retrospective, the exhibition had also a prospective dimension: it was assumed as a manifesto which affirms artist’s conceptual and working principles in the field of digital art, ones that are anchored on new aesthetic paradigms, in contrast with traditional art and visual practices.
Artist Statement
In my art, I am interested in experimenting with non-aestheticized means in areas where there are no pre-existing, limiting rules in what regards expressivity, technique, image or form. I model 3D scenes in the virtual space of the computer as if I design forms in the real world. The virtual space thus becomes a place of personal freedom, of spiritual manifestation, a world freed from any material conditions. Each individual work carries a story, a conceptual path, a string of images and situations articulated at the confluence between real and virtual worlds through Augmented Reality technologies. The flow of consciousness takes shape in my art, time becoming, therefore, a key component of the work.