A reflection on the status of the image as a balance of forces in tension, and as a paradoxical act of cancellation of the body through its own representation. In Ion Grigorescu's work, as in the volume, the body is continually shown in different ways — from pictures to film, from performance to drawing — and yet remains absent, obscuring its own identity in an attempt to question the collective one.

Unable to show his art under the regime, he 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 proof of resistance, above all 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 defending the dignity of everyday life.

His act of dissidence is not an outcry of provocation, nor is it extreme: it is an anti-aesthetic operation that 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.

“My mind is blank... For days, for years. Unable to see some possible life... The clock ticks, it is late, silence weeps, and time is not...” — George Bacovia