A reflection about the status of the image as a balance of forces in tension and a paradoxical act of cancellation of the body through its own representation.

In Ion Grigorescu’s work, as in the book, the body is continually shown in different ways - from photography to film, from performance to drawing - and yet it remains absent, obscuring its own identity in an attempt to question the collective one. As it is impossible to show his art during the regime, it ends up hiding, disappearing inside the image. Instead of showing, the image conceals, because it is non-documentary and non-transmittable; it is an act of birth, a prove of the artist’s resistance, especially as a human being inside (or against) any geographical or historical background. In the rituals of his gestures and in the symbolism of his performances, Grigorescu finds a way to stay alive, preserving his own intellectual status while also defending the dignity of everyday life.

The book traces the progression, both expansive and inclusive, of his work, which inscribes itself into the space of the body and of the world. Grigorescu absorbs elements of the surrounding reality, showing us a continuity between art and life: his act of dissidence is not an outcry of provocation, nor is it extreme; it is an anti-aesthetic operation which uses experimentation and rough techniques to uncover the fiction of art, to denounce the artifice of representation and to affirm images as an instrument of subversive power.

Ion Grigorescu (Bucharest, 1945) is one of the most significant Romanian contemporary artists of the Post-War period and an iconic figure of the conceptual and performative art since the early 70s. He represented Romania at Venice Biennial in 1997 and 2011; his works are in the main public collections, such as MoMA, New York; mumok and Erste Foundation, Vienna; Tate Modern and Deutsche Bank AG, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris.

Second volume of Ion Grigorescu's translated diaries, assembled like a small literary and art-historical sensation of the period between 1976 and 1979.

In recent years, the work of Ion Grigorescu, one of the seminal Eastern European visual artists of his generation, has attracted increasing attention in the West. This volume is the second of his translated diaries—the first from 1970 to 1975 was published in 2014 by Sternberg Press—and is assembled like a small literary and art-historical sensation of the period between 1976 and 1979. It not only counters the facile reading of Grigorescu's practice in the context of Conceptual art and performance art, but provides insight into the artist's multifocal thinking, which incorporates an original critique of modernism, the dystopian effects of an instrumentalized idea of reason and rationality, an analysis of subjectivity, and a penetrating gaze into a dialectic of secrecy and elucidation, of exposure and mystification.

Grigorescu's diaries are written notes revolving around the status of the image and investigate the relation of the body to society and of art to the world through a phenomenological approach. His work proposes a parallel conception of the public made tangible through the eloquence of the body.

In poetic language full of powerfully pictorial metaphors, Grigorescu's reflects on the tension between the realistic effects of the image, the suppression of realism, and the hidden traces the gaze holds through the activities of the increasingly present unconscious of collective memory. Along with the drawings, paintings, photographs, and sketches that accompany them, the diaries serve as an introduction that open the possibility of conceiving Grigorescu's art as a rare evocation of a singular way of thinking: a stance.

Ion Grigorescu (born 1945, lives and works in Bucarest) is one of the most emblematic artistic personalities of the post-war period in Romania, a key figure of conceptual artin Eastern Europe.