Invasive Imaginations

Mihai Grecu creates visual poems that are metaphors of isolation, deconstruction and transitions. They offer a perspective on current environmental conditions, inviting viewers to contemplate the relationship between humans and the spaces they inhabit.

Grecu's artistic journey is rooted in his early video works that captivated me with a unique, lingering clarity and slowness. In surreal scenes, we witness unexpected transformations of the mundane into the mystical. Beginning with the first video production freon, the artist created eerie scenes that skillfully foreshadow the liminal surrealism many embrace in recent works of AI origin (and this as early as in 2004).

Through Grecu's lens, mundane objects gain extraordinary significance; under the centipede sun explores what is left of civilization after what appears to be a devastating war, while in glucose, goldfish bowls become vessels of surprise, their inhabitants defying the limits of physical confinement.

This is a recurring motif in Grecu's body of work: an exploration of the ordinary morphing into the extraordinary, a metaphorical reflection on the permeable boundaries between reality and imagination that lets us witness strange invasions of sights defying our physical reality. Billowing smoke, scorched desert terrains, and metaphorical portrayals of human interactions are the artist's visual tools for this initially.

A characteristic of Grecu's work is the quiet crescendo it achieves. Amidst the visual splendor and surreal metamorphoses, there is an underlying sense of hushed contemplation. The artist creates his visual poems with an astute awareness of the power of ambient silence, allowing his narratives to gradually unfold, often enveloping the audience in a cocoon of ambient sounds like desert wind, radio noise, and low, droning hums.

The uninterrupted way the virtual landscapes unfold reminds me of the vast dimensions of land art. There appears to be a dialogue between human creativity and nature, and just like land artists sculpted landscapes, Grecu crafts digital terrains.

15 years later, the artist's first NFTs (like Blackrock, artifact or the mesmerizing quantum indeterminancy series) appear as captivating excerpts from their previous works. In a way, this mirrors the tentative way that strange physical effects enter Grecu's video scenes, only to bloom into unmistakable disturbances of reality.

It seems like the artist expanded on his early works when he created the series Desert spirits, adding looming, amorphous presences to them. My favourites are Ghost of a predator and The wheel of time that wonderfully embody the sense of mystery of Grecu's work and that might, in case of the former, be influenced by the artist's work on SOL-AIR, a yet unreleased video project announced on his website.

After this, Grecu was quick to embrace the then upcoming AI tools, first with AI GATEKEEPERS and then with his AI DUNES series that depicts characters from a fictional card trading game inspired by Dune.

Now, with his most recent series Desert ghosts that envisions paranormal inhabitants of the barren spaces created nearly two decades ago, the artist seems to have come full circle.

Compared to the measured pace and sublime enigma of the artist's earlier works, the pieces released so far appear as short glimpses. This keeps the scenes from falling into the convoluted, aimless morphing that is still a characteristic of AI videos, yet I miss the cinematic, thoughtful quality I have come to admire in earlier works.

Anyway, these releases enabled me to get my first Grecu, something that I have been wanting to for a long time, and I am happy that now, I could add Fractal Flower to my collection.

I'm curious to see which direction Mihai Grecu will go next with his art. Will it be a further exploration of AI, or a new take on the fascinating cinematography that he worked on before his entrance into Web3?

I hope that either way, it will be full of the liminal slowness that makes his previous works so special.

The artist's early videos are hosted on vimeo, for which fx(text) doesn't offer a way to embed them. Please visit https://mihaigrecu.net/works/ and enjoy them in full length from there.