DOI 10.60531/INSIGHTOUT.2024.2.13| CORODAN: THE SELF SLIDES OVER THE SELF WITH FRICTION_ INSIGHTOUT 2(2024) 93 Citing filmic infrastructure(visible cameras, frame­jumps, spontaneous cuts, scratches on the film), Gri­gorescu performs exaggerated, essentialising and even ironic stances of the masculine and the femini­ne, both united and ruptured in a single yet multiple body. These stances, movements and explorations not only allow a destabilisation of strictly separated gender codes, but also construct new ones, integra­ting them in Grigorescu’s new system of references, his own language. In the first five short scenes, the mirror becomes the first agent of duplication and stratification. During these, Grigorescu is not alone, but doubled, repre­senting the two(two?) actors present in the dialogue which is not reduced to the organic. The element of the mirror, a recurrent feature in Grigorescu’s work, has a long tradition in the iconography of art histo­ry. From representing vanity in the Middle Ages, the mirror has told a tale of introspection and self-re­ferentiality as well as inviting psychoanalytical rea­dings. In this specific prose, Grigorescu’s mirror is many: a delegate flirting with the history of self-re­ferentiality and arrogantly quoting Lacan, but also, at the most rudimentary level, a simple, yet extremely complex prop. This object, oscillating between tech­nical trickery and leitmotif, produces agglomerations of images, each different in their logic of production, and unifies them on the film strip. These medially di­vergent entities are not two visually isolated mor­phologies – one organic, one projected – but mer­ged. The mirror, interconnected with his flesh at the level of the image, cuts through the architecture of his body, building a chimera with two torsos and two heads. In the middle of this monstrous stage design, the performance of the feminine and the masculine elongates itself beyond one singular body. This elon­gation: not homogenous, it exerts disruption. The iconic masculine organ: cut, almost castrated from this collaged duality. The body: incomplete, its mul­tiplicity refrains from presenting itself as whole. This theme: reiterated. With a title gravid with denotation, Delivery/Birth (1977) captures Ion Grigorescu performing a faux birth; a baked pastry and jam(one imagines) em­bodies his newborn. Fourteen analogue photo­graphs stumble in their resemblance to a chrono­photographic sequence, negating linear narrative progression and quoting the essence of photogra­phy’s more mobile relative – film. Based on diffé­rance and incongruence, not only the film but also the body of the artist oscillates between the child and the mother, yet is consistently marked, almost haunted, by the man. A proposition: instability of identity. This trembling subject, much like Freud’s Oedipus, cannot separate itself from its mother, a mother(to be read also as artist, to be read as man) whose integrity is continually fractured by the violence of the frame. Affirming the medium and its ability to counter reality by constructing di­vergent renditions by manipulating the index, Ion Grigorescu proposes an alignment of fractured units – both physical and medial – that(dis)con­nect. When viewing the photographic series as a unified single image, the limbs of the artist melt across the frames, forming abstract and biologi­cally impossible shapes, starting from and leading to nowhere. Not yet a comic strip, however resem­blant of its structure while also denying its coher­ent narrative progression, this grotesque montage proposes along its chimeras an investigation into the potential of photographic production, in which the paradox of denotation and connotation intert­wine and conflict. It is here where Barthes’ struc­tural analysis of photography becomes entangled in Grigorescu’s metaphorical language. Barthes’ self-procreating method describing photographi­cal genesis serves as a tongue-in-cheek analogy to Grigorescu’s pictorial objects that oscillate between motherhood, manhood and birth – a me­taphor for(artistic) creation – as they are“glued together, limb by limb,[…] as though united by an eternal coitus”. 7 7 R. Barthes, Camera Lucida. Reflections on Photography (New York, 1981), 6.