RETROPERSPECTIVE – A Digital Manifesto, Museum of Art, Cluj 2022
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About This Project
Adrian Grecu
RetroPerspective. A digital manifesto
Curator: Horea Avram
July 21 – August 7 2022
The works selected in the exhibition RetroPerspective. A digital manifesto, both recent and older, are all representative for the visionary artistic production of Adrian Grecu, one of the veteran artists in Romania who employ and exploit digital media and their expressive and conceptual potential.
The project is equally a retrospective exercise – so necessary for a mature artist with a rich activity, spanning over 25 years – and at the same time a programmatic manifesto about digitality and our way to deal with today’s world (via technology).
As the title suggests, the artist proposes in this project a discourse about utopias and dystopias, still present in the collective imagination, but also a commentary on the idea of power, both that of political structures and their potential abuses, as well as that of the artistic practices and the latest technologies, more precisely of their power of visualization and conceptualization. And how could this be suggested better than provocatively waving a flag in the exhibition’s generic which bears the “Power” symbol specific to electronic instruments.
The selection includes works presented in print or digital animation format, some of them produced as early as the ’90s (!), an installation that builds metaphorically, in the physical space, the idea of cloud and the network, as well as an Augmented Reality application which facilitates the interaction between real, digital and symbolic. If one seeks to identify a constant that runs through Adrian Grecu’s work, this is represented by the visual accuracy, by the lucid preoccupation for form and care for texture, doubled by the multiple valences in conceptual and symbolic order of the works.
RetroPerspective. A digital manifesto is, therefore, an exhibition that constitutes a true manifesto of the era in which we live and of our ever expanding experience of this world, one that is more and more determined and infused by the digital.
Date
July 21, 2022