CASSIOPEIA (Fragmenta Arcadiae)

> about the image:

Fragmenta corporis, fragmenta memoriae.

(Fragments of the body, fragments of memory)

“CASSIOPEIA (Fragmenta Arcadiae)” revisits the mythic topography of the ancient world by dismantling its most persistent illusion: coherence. What appears at first glance as a sculptural tableau rooted in Greek and Roman antiquity soon reveals itself as a palimpsest of fractures – an elaborate field of recomposed bodies, severed gestures, and recursive motifs extracted from the iconographic repertoire of the heroic age. Here, the Arcadian ideal is not represented but interrogated. The image performs a quiet dismantling of classical harmony, turning the serenity of myth into an unstable architecture of repetition and distortion. The figures – Perseus, Andromeda, Cassiopeia, Cetus, the warriors and horses carved into reliefs of imperial triumph – no longer behave as stable characters in a narrative. They dissolve into fragments, multiplied and mirrored until the mythic body becomes an unresolved pattern: part constellation, part psychoanalytic diagram. The work draws on Cassiopeia’s cosmic punishment – her forced inversion in the sky – to underscore a broader conceptual shift. These bodies are suspended in an endless rotation, neither fallen nor redeemed, caught in an epistemic loop where the heroic and the erotic cannot be disentangled. As the surface fractures into vertical strata, each strip functions like a temporal slice: a decomposition of sculpture into dream matter, where memory behaves like marble under stress. The white, near-ossified palette evokes both the funerary clarity of Roman sarcophagi and the bleaching effect of digital overexposure. Between these poles – classical stone and contemporary image – emerges a third register: a spectral field where Thanatos shadows Eros, where Freudian desire collides with mythological restraint, and where the “Et in Arcadia Ego” motif is less a memento mori than a reminder of mythology’s internal contradictions. “Fragmenta Arcadiae” does not reconstruct the myth of Cassiopeia. It demonstrates its collapse. What remains is an anatomy of cultural memory – disassembled, recombined, and exposed as a series of aesthetic residues that refuse to resolve into a single body or a single story.

> series statement:

FRAGMENTA DEORUM reexamines classical mythology through a contemporary process of visual decomposition and reassembly. In this series, Alexandru Crișan approaches the divine body not as a fixed icon but as a mutable structure – an image that can be dismantled, reorganized, and reanimated through the logic of the fragment. Trained as an architect, Crișan adopts an analytical method in which sculpture becomes material, symmetry becomes strategy, and the image behaves like a spatial system rather than a narrative scene. Each work operates within a field of controlled instability. Fragments of ancient reliefs, gestures, and anatomical details are multiplied and recomposed into new configurations where recognition and uncertainty coexist. These images provoke pareidolia: faces emerge where none were placed, mythic creatures surface from folds of marble, and bodies appear to oscillate between coherence and dissolution. Meaning does not reside in any single element but in the shifting relations among them. The series engages mythology as a psychological reservoir rather than a storytelling device. Echoes of Greek and Roman deities – Medeia, Hecate, Cassiopeia – are not depicted but inferred, surfacing through repetition, distortion, and dream-like recombination. This oneiric dimension aligns the work with psychoanalytic readings of the image, where memory, desire, and symbolic residue intertwine. The divine re-enters contemporary vision not as a stable figure but as an afterimage: a structure of intimation, erosion, and metamorphosis. FRAGMENTA DEORUM proposes that fragmentation is a generative force. Through decomposition, the sacred is not lost but redistributed; through recomposition, myth becomes newly legible. Each artwork stands as a contemporary relic, a threshold where architecture, mythology, and the unconscious converge. Crișan’s images reveal that the gods persist – not in their intact forms, but in the fragments through which they continue to speak.

> project page: FRAGMENTA DEORUM

> Special Large Collector’s Edition of 10, numbered from 1/10

> Format SL1 90CM, SL2 120cm, SL3 150cm on shortest edge

> “CASSIOPEIA (Fragmenta Arcadiae)” is available for purchase in one unique Art Limited Collector’s Edition of 10 and 2 Artist’s Proofs, in giclee archival art print at the highest museum quality standards, on Fine Art cotton paper from Hahnemuhle with pigment ink. The Collector’s Editions are certified signature editions, stamped and numbered on the back side. Additionally, as a separate document, a dedicated signed Certificate of Authenticity, with artwork title, date and edition number, indicate that you have purchased an original exclusive artwork. No further reproduction of any kind will be run after the collector edition is sold out. The prices for Special Large Collector Editions are progressive. For other detailed information’s see the section ART PRINTS.