Remus Grecu
Remus Grecu: My work explores the relationship between reality and poetry within a defined cinematic intensity. The display of light and shade is also an important matter in my paintings.
There are themes that I'm interested in which include: magic, isolation, ritualic proceedings, corruption of the human mind, censorship, religion, social disease and alienation.
As an artist I'm not to reveal answers through my work, however to generate questions for the spectator and make him think and wonder. I'm not interested in representing 'per se' the subject from within my paintings, as much as I want to veil it under a certain kind of haze and a poetical whiff. There is also the point of not making a series of paintings with the same conclusion. I'm not interested in creating 'partial' works that have to be seen through a series of paintings. Each painting has to have it's own self-reliant entity, therefore it should be unique and not related to a pair or more.
Since I'm inspired by cinema I want my paintings to look like 'moving' stills. I like the filmic adventure of an image because it brings more mystery into the subject. Furthermore, there is a certain nostalgic time passing inside the images I create, alongside with a deep and often heavy psychological awareness.
After all, the subject is in the eye and mind of the viewer, the artist should deliver veiled subjects and mystery through his work.
Remus Grecu Interview
Hi Remus, tell us about your background. How and when did you first start to paint?
I was born in a seaside town in an ex communist Romania, grew up in a grey dramatic atmosphere and yet my childhood was a happy, beautiful and free like story tale. In a sense it's strange because as a child I had a great time in a country where people had to eat on monthly rations cards. I also as a kid I didn't feel that much the political pleasure even so for some people was really hard from that point of view, and yes some or many people where killed by the oppressive communist regime because of being considered 'enemies of the state'
And so in this kind of communist 'world' I was gone start to realize when I was around 3-4 years old, that my way of existing as an entity was gone be through scribbling, drawing or painting, or as we call it 'ART'
In a way, to me it was simple because I knew from that small age what I will be doing for the rest of my life. Of course it took me tens of years to realise that I will become a professional artist and I will be utterly dedicated to painting.
I've been studying painting at the Art University from Bucharest, even so now looking back I wouldn't do it again and I would never advise anyone to study art, because finding your self isn't through 'education' but through educating yourself and through being curious to find and discover everyday new things.
Anyhow after some time I left Romania for London, where I used to live like crazy and not doing art at all, and after 5 years of living that world of night clubs and parties I decided to move to the peaceful Stockholm. There in Sweden I can say I found that all I have to do is to become serious and try the world through my paintings.
But only now after more than 10 years of painting seriously, I understood the art market and how things are going within this cluster of art galleries and museums.
And so, here I am letting my past fly away and finding myself again and again for the big breakthrough, because I know this will come for my work pretty soon.
How do you begin to work? What is your process like?
Obviously at first I get the idea of a piece of work, I write it down on a note pad and when the right time comes I take photos with this idea and with the model I will use for the painting. Actually from the process of getting an idea till the final work, I think that split-second of imagining something is the most important thing, the rest it's craft and the use of learned or educated skills.
After I take photos I work on them in Photoshop and make the digital 'painting'
And only after I'm done with the Photoshop process I start to physically paint that image on linen.
It's a quite long process that takes time, because I also work over and over again on a painting, nowadays though I'm happier to loosen up and make things much lighter and sketchier. After many years of working sometimes for months on a painting, I realised that I'm not anymore interested in working too much on a painting and also to prove my painting technique.
Your sources of inspiration are the relationship between reality, poetry and cinema. Explain more how this subject matters associated with a piece of work?
Indeed, this was my idea from the start, to use through poetry and cinema my ideas, but because right now I'm working on things that are somehow different from what I did for more than 10 years, I can't say it's still my main idea of making cinematic poetical images like.
But yes indeed I find cinema more appealing in many ways than the stills of paintings. In my old paintings I wanted to create almost like moving images, or to at least create a feeling of film like stills in my paintings. But those kinds of images are past for me, the darkness, the hard gutsy subjects, or the clar obscure.
Been too many years inside the belly of the big angry fish. Now I'm released from there and enjoying the sunlight, the shining beauty of this world and life in self. My subjects are also different now, much simpler and straight forward, and because there was too much darkness in my past paintings now I paint the bright white snow that sadly is disappearing more and more from this planet.
In a way the symbol of snow to me is life itself. And my right now inspirations are subjects that someday use to keep us together and give us our identity, and that's mainly folklore traditions. To me this also brings some shamanic feeling of our one and the same existence as a 'humanity'. And so in a way I try to contemporize the folklore traditions through my new full of light paintings.
From here on and from the dark past there will be only light and beauty in my paintings.
Light and shades play a pivotal role in your paintings. How does this feature of contrast explain the concept of your work?
The same thing here, light and dark contrast shades were the things that I liked to use in my paintings, because I just wanted to reveal some kind of dramatism within my paintings. This is the past though. In contrast with that view of making things, now is only light left to me, not in the sense that the impressionists used the light in their paintings, but in a sense of light being the synonym of life. There was mystery in a drama, now I want to create mystery still, but through light.
What is the strangest experience in your practice/career?
Probably the strangest experience that happened to me was when sometimes people would leave my shows because they felt that there was too much pain in my paintings. It's crazy though, because looking back now I understand that indeed it's so much about struggle and pain in my old paintings. And so I had these odd moments when people will tell me about pain and heavy feelings and leave my show, this happen to me around 3 times
