In the beginning was a fascination with Monsù Desiderio—an enigmatic 17th-century painter, creator of apocalyptic visions and cities in ruins. Spoiler alert: there were two of them.

Four centuries ago, François de Nomé and Didier Barra, originally from Metz and active in Naples, produced works of striking modernity: flaming landscapes, suspended ruins, and devastated architectures where ancient references and biblical visions collide. Their practice, collaborative and signed under a single name, already anticipated contemporary concepts such as co-creation, shared pseudonyms, and fragmented identity. Today, Mihai Grecu revisits and extends this legacy. A visual artist and filmmaker, he in turn collaborates with artificial intelligence and a traditional painting workshop to give birth to a collective, hybrid body of work.

Here, paintings and videos engage in a dialogue with our era. Nourished by memory and images, artificial intelligence technologies seem strangely akin to Monsù Desiderio: they draw from the collective unconscious, recompose impossible architectures, and invent new ruins with shattered perspectives.

Apocalypse NOW thus questions the timelessness of artworks, the vanity of human constructions, and the fragile beauty of a world in perpetual recomposition.