Melonland

Mihai Grecu explores collective memory, political imaginaries and the unstable relationship between image and reality through a recurring watermelon iconography. About Mihai Grecu is a visual artist and filmmaker. His work sits at the crossroads of several cultural spheres and of the imperial histories that shaped them, which gives it a particular force in a context under constant reassessment: one shaped by political events, by exchange, by climate questions, by wars and by the immediacy of information and disinformation alike. Working on social subjects through the prism of a symbol, of a recurring meme (an image or idea that circulates and replicates by being copied), the artist offers an almost immediate critical reading of society, one in which subjects overlap and play on the simultaneity of possible understandings. Here the fruit (an iconography inherited from the still life) becomes an instrument for interrogating history, power, memory and the value of an allegory. In art history, the still life has served in turn to express abundance, social status, wealth. It also serves to show that the pursuit of wealth is vain: wealth is real, factual, but it offers no escape from passing time, from death. The genre questions the pleasure of the senses, sensuality, prosperity: a form of gratification bound up with profusion. But once the fruit begins to wither, what is at stake is the corruption of bodies and of matter, and with it the passage of time. The still life also allows us to question how an image is constructed and how it is perceived. The watermelon, by virtue of its "cylindrical" form, is unstable by nature. Here it underlines what is in motion: time, life, cycles, perception and our relation to the world; and with them the societies caught up in ever more instantaneous flows of images. Utopia or dystopia? From abundance to shortage, the work points back to a totalitarian Romania in which the watermelon was, for the Romanian population as for Grecu himself, the only dessert of the summer, because nothing else was available. In Romania, the watermelon is above all a popular, rural and regional symbol rather than a national emblem. The Dăbuleni region in Oltenia is so closely associated with growing it that the lubeniță has become a genuine territorial brand. The watermelon embodies the link between the land, agricultural labour and local identity. It carries a series of powerful symbolic oppositions: drought and water, poor soil and abundance. It stands for a population's belonging to a culture and to its rites, and it summons today a popular heritage now called into question by societal concerns such as climate and consumption. The subject thus becomes a vector for a satire of consumer society, of its identity, of the politics that govern it, of collective memory and of ecology. In the term Harald Szeemann coined at documenta 5 in 1972 ("individual mythologies") Grecu builds his artistic discourse as a mythology, an individual history, while also questioning more broadly the evolution of a culture. In Grecu's case, what is brought into particular focus is the exit from the communist era and the interrogation of democracy, as his film NICOLAE (2021) attests. After 1989, the country undertook a difficult transition towards democracy and a market economy. Romania has since undergone profound economic and social transformation, despite persistent societal problems. This recurring iconography also allows Grecu to layer levels of reading and appropriation for a wider public: the symbol becomes an extended political one, at once forceful and unstable. In Palestine, for instance, the colours of the watermelon echo those of the Palestinian flag; the fruit becomes a political symbol of resistance in the face of prohibition. Like Warhol, or the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, the repeated use of a single symbol, of a single "product", makes it possible to question the various facets and fault lines of a society. The allegory becomes an instrument that both points to and disseminates a message, and that holds a memory of historical stakes. In Grecu's work, the watermelon is an infinitely reproducible icon with a history recognisable to everyone, even before the artist takes hold of it. Artificial intelligence now enables the circulation of images produced with generative tools, raising the question of how a society evolves when it is called upon to develop a new perception of the rhythm of History, one in which myths are manufactured faster than the news. Grecu's use of AI allows him to produce a multitude of visual variations and fables, disseminating his message with a strong critical immediacy that is at times violent, at times derisory. Chance seems to become the material itself, and the aleatory carries an immediate critical and subversive charge. The artist thereby inscribes his work within a history of political situationism and of the theory of the dérive, in the lineage of Guy Debord. Artificial intelligence blurs the boundary between conception and realisation. The immediacy of execution can, in a sense, approach a form of sketch, leading to the necessity and the desire to return to the "classical" techniques of drawing and sculpture in order to anchor the message and introduce a resistance to the flow of images. In using this tool, Grecu becomes an author of potentialities while preserving the originality of the artistic gesture. The excellence of Grecu's drawings and sculptures anchors his subjects in a long, historical reading set against the proliferation of images. The artist thus shifts the temporality of the value of the symbol he represents. 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