THE SILENCE BETWEEN

For his debut solo exhibition at BEERS, Romanian painter Remus Grecu presents The Silence Between, a work that presents an idealized version of the world based as much in Renaissance painting as the digital age and ideas of a utopian future. 

Taking its title from G.W. Leibniz' Theodicy, a treatise about good and evil written in 1710 in which the philosopher argues that the actual world is the best of all possible worlds. For Grecu, this notion is applied to art - whereby today's contemporary artists have the greatest breadth, access, and ubiquity to visual representation in the history of art. For Grecu, visual tropes like those seen across Renaissance painters (he attributes Lotto and Ghrirlandaio as two particularly influential artists after a recent trip to Rome) but also how ideas become reduced and repeated over time. He comments on AI imagery and ChatGPT where the history of visual representation or even the artist's work is somehow flattened into a series of repeated motifs or ideas. 

For instance, if we ask AI to describe "An Old Man and His Grandson" by Domenico Ghirlandaio, the words that arise might then be compared to a description of tropes across any other media, and this has, in a way, informed Grecu's practice. Looking at the history of art versus contemporary art, we see how certain patterns, motifs, or genres sort of...rise to the surface. Instead of hiding from this, Grecu leans into the patterns and taking them even a step further. His variations of historic tropes seem even more futurized, more idealized, more superficial. 

Recurrent to each painting is a female figure, one who seems to be something of a hyper-stylized Victorian era heroines - as likely to be Jane Eyre or a reanimated Emma Stone in Poor Things - she is in fact Cunégonde, the heroine of Voltaire’s Candide, symbolizing the fleeting beauty of youth and the impermanence of life. But she may as well be a modern-day Mona Lisa, presented before a tableau of draped, richly coloured silks that recall Davíd or Veronese, almost as much as they pull from the psychedelic, distant interplanetary landscapes described so vividly in late-era C.S. Lewis, or the off-kilter (sur)realities currently served up by. But Grecu's fantastical worlds have been brought to vivid realization with his meticulous painterly style, his unabashed and magnificent use of saturated colour, and a presentation of ripe and rotund fruits that seem to spill and tumble from the painted surface. 

What all this talk tends to overlook, however, is the raw skill it takes to make such commentary feel effortless. The painterly prowess that so few artists actually possess necessary to make such complicit or subversive critique feel natural. Because on another level, the beauty in Grecu's work is quite simply how lush and luxuriant his worlds, colours, and figures come across. And how we, as viewers, should relish in the "best possible vision" of a world presented here. 

According to Grecu: "After all, the main idea of this new series of paintings is to be like an opposition to the imperfect world we live in, a world striked by wars and suffering, with corrupt politicians and so many other awful things that happen on this planet. 

I wanted my paintings to be images filled with happiness, with beautiful colors and unreal atmosphere, with no unhappy stains in them, and as I said, to be an opposition to the insanity that takes place in our imperfect world."

REMUS GRECO (b. 1976, Bucharest, Romania) graduated in 2001 with a BA in Fine Arts from the University of Arts, Bucharest.

Solo exhibitions include: The Best of All Possible Worlds, Steve Turner Gallery, LA, USA (2024); Praying For The Snow, IOMO Gallery, Romania (2022); Night Rainbows, CAI Gallery, Belgium (2021) and; If This Is Heaven There Should Be More, Jan Dhaese Gallery, Belgium (2018).

Group Exhibitions include: Double Vission, Plato Gallery, New York, USA (2024); IOMO Gallery, Romania (2021) and; Jan Dhaese Gallery, Belgium (2016).

Fairs include: KIAF, Steve Turner Gallery, Seoul, Korea (2024); Art Herning, Denmark (2018) and Scope Miami, USA (2017)