The speed of life is a nerve-wracking business. Ioan Grosu knows this. He paints and draws with great alacrity so as not to lose pace or fall behind. The objects, figures and forms in his pictures often appear schematic, unfinished, rough, raw and even primitive at times. They are the ruins of awareness that have withstood the force of forgetfulness. They are the murky leftovers of thoughts that have remained. Ioan Grosu forces objects into his own logic; he bends them, distorts them, and destroys them. He paints with a brutal and spiteful energy, one to match the speed of life as it drives him on.
Because the Romanian born artist, living and working in Munich and Italy, knows that there is no way to paint up reality, he reduces it down to its crude essence in the attempt to track it down. In some of H.P. Lovecraft’s thrillers, the American writer has described beings that have entered our world from another dimension. The shapes and forms of these abstract beings adhere to a non-Euclidian geometry which cannot be explained by the laws of our physics. They create an eerie impression, as our intellectual capacities are revealed as insufficient for comprehending the nature of their beings. Ioan Grosu produces similar forms—only, his objects and figures do not stem from another world but are rooted in our own actuality. Grosu severs them from reality and, maiming them almost beyond recognition, exposes their existential foreignness. He paints a tumult of entangled contours upon a chair—we surmise the depiction of a human figure, but, in the hands of Grosu, it has moldered into an abstract play of forms. Grosu’s paintings and drawings irritate and alienate.
Along with Baudelaire, he is certain that beauty can stem not only from Heaven but from Hell as well. In their existentialism, his work recalls the paintings of Francis Bacon. Whereas Bacon remained vigilant concerning painterly craftsmanship and realized his figures and forms with detailed precision, Ioan Grosu has lost the patience for such punctiliousness. The twenty-five year old artist is a child of the 21st century. He paints whatever haunts him directly onto the canvas or draws it onto paper. With no reverence for the conventions, he works quickly, coarsely and without illusion. It is therein that the visual power of his art lies. Sometimes, he crumples up drawings that will not seem to go his way. After picking them back up from off of the floor and smoothing them out a bit, he finds that they have become something else; they suddenly begin to work. The random creases in the paper have now provided the kind of fleetingness, flippancy and spontaneous aggression that makes the drawing contemporary and right. Still, it is not as though only darkness had a place in Grosu’s work. In fact, it is especially in his drawings that a certain tenderness comes to light, revealing schemes that appear to disintegrate optimistically into their colorfulness—in flight from reality and yet in full accord with the speed of life in the 21st century.
You are staying here in Umbria for the next couple of months. Will you be working here as well?
Yes, I will. I have rented a house here for a couple of months.
Why Italy?
I have always felt drawn to Italy somehow. I cannot say exactly why, but it seemed that the time had finally come for me to explore it a bit for myself. It has certainly been good to get away from Munich. For some reason, I was not able to concentrate on my work there anymore; now I’ve ended up here.
In German romantic literature, there is the classic motif of the painter who, full of yearning, moves to Italy to learn from the old masters. Did that play any role in your decision to move to Umbria?
I have been told about that, but it was not part of my motivation in moving here. To me, it just seems to be a good place to work—at least, that is what I am hoping for.
Do you need a degree of loneliness or solitude in order to paint?
I am not exactly sure what I need. I am trying to approach my time here with as much self-determination as possible—to drop out of the everyday so that I can concentrate on my work. Munich was getting too stuffy for me. I needed some time to build up my own life, to create my very own daily routines—away from all of the dependencies. I am not sure if that will work here or not... I am definitely not looking for loneliness, however.
Are your immediate surroundings important for your painting? Or is it completely independent of them?
There is no immediate connection between the two. On the other hand, it is impossible to avoid being influenced in some way by the things that I see everyday. I do not search for particular surroundings in order to integrate them into my work though.
Despite the abstraction in your painting, a number of representational elements have been retained. When are you interested in representation or specific forms?
I paint what I paint because it has come to mind; my pictures have no explicit purpose or goal. I am not trying to explain anything.
What interests you about the medium of painting?
I try to avoid any rigid systems or fixed rules. Over the last few days, I have been working on a drawing upon which I wrote the words “in rot [red].” I cannot tell you why I did this though. Sometimes certain motifs wander over from painting into my drawings, and vice versa. It amuses me to watch that happen.
All the same, you definitely have a clearly identifiable style. Your motifs tend to bear a certain morbidity, and geometry plays an important role; nevertheless, your pictures have something organic about them in a peculiar way. On the one hand, they are highly stylized and well-condensed; on the other hand, they retain a certain raw quality—almost primitive.
Everything around us is moving and changing so quickly that it is difficult to capture anything at all. The frustration this situation often causes can lead to aggression. That might explain the impression some get in terms of morbidity.
Aggression is a good word. There is something aggressive about the way you handle forms—the way you deal with geometry and the structure of the objects that you paint or draw.
Maybe it is just the natural aggression that exists in the world. It is changing everything around us. There is a violence involved in that.
Can you recall one of your first decisive encounters with art?
I am referring not only to painting but also to film or literature ... I grew up in a Catholic family. Most of the pictures that I saw as a child depicted Christian motifs—icons. The first more eventful images that stuck with me were the film shots of Chauchescu’s execution. The first museum art that I was impressed by were Picasso paintings exhibited in Paris; I was sixteen at the time. When I was still eight or nine years old, the tattoos of my sister’s friends fascinated me. My first series of drawings looked like tattoo studies—very precise, drawn with pencil and markers.
What did these tattoos look like?
Animals, flowers, and plants. A couple of months ago, I was flipping through the pages of a Fra Angelico catalogue. He placed circles of flowers around his figures—a closed and yet open motif. It really reminded me of my tattoo drawings from back then.
Now that you have mentioned Chauchescu: Has Romania—the nation’s culture, your childhood there—been an influence on your painting?
No. My drawings and paintings are formalist; they do not have anything to do with whatever may have occurred in my personal life.
How did you come to be an artist?
During my childhood and early youth, everything that was designated as art felt censored and fundamentally false. Nonetheless, I had always been fascinated by art, particularly painting. For a long time, however, I did not know much about it. I do not come from a family that liked to talk about art at the dinner table. To the contrary. All the information I was able to gather came in small doses. I was forced to sort and evaluate it all on my own.
We have already spoken about aggression; it seems to me that your work also reflects a good deal of impatience—with the material and with art in general.
A picture must be drawn or painted quickly. I am impatient with the paint. I like to reduce the motifs down to a level of clarity that conforms to the way I see them in my head—in accordance with my feeling.
You work directly and intuitively then? The goal, then, is to transfer a feeling or a whim onto the canvas with unabridged immediacy?
I paint some of my motifs repeatedly, each time onto a new canvas. I do this until the motif finally reflects the immediacy that I am looking for. Very few pieces survive the process.
For one of your drawing series, you took some motifs you had drawn on paper and crumpled them into balls before smoothing them out again in order to exhibit them. How did you arrive at this process?
I sometimes leave my paintings sitting around for days before returning to them to continue until they are finished or until I end up throwing them away. I wanted to see how this process could be applied to drawing. I crumpled up a piece of paper because I was unsatisfied with my drawing on it and could no longer bear looking at it. When I uncrumpled it again, I realized that I suddenly had an entirely new drawing in front of me. I was much happier with it that way.
(Translation by Nathan Moore)
