ARGONAUTICA (Tabula Pelagi)

> about the image:

Pelagus non legitur nisi in cicatricibus navium.

(the sea is read only in the scars of ships – fragmentum nauticum)

ARGONAUTICA (Tabula Pelagi) treats the Argonaut myth not as a heroic narrative, but as a cartography of desire and risk. The classical relief is decomposed into a rigorous grid, an architectural armature onto which fragments of bodies, oars, shields, horses, and waves are re-inscribed. The result resembles less a scene and more a nautical chart: a tabula pelagi, where the voyage toward the Golden Fleece has been translated into a matrix of visual coordinates. The white grid functions simultaneously as constraint and instrument. It recalls the rational structures of architectural drawing, but here the grid does not clarify; it destabilizes. Each square contains a micro-episode, a partial gesture, a torsion of marble. As the eye moves across the surface, these units begin to connect in unpredictable ways: a hand from one cell completes an arm in another, a face seems to reappear at several scales, a hero dissolves into ornament. The image invites pareidolia, pushing the viewer to “navigate” the surface, to reconstruct a route that is no longer given by story but by perception. This work situates the Argonauts within a contemporary discourse on mapping and power. To chart the sea is to claim it, to impose order on what is fluid and indifferent. In ARGONAUTICA (Tabula Pelagi), that impulse toward mastery is both acknowledged and subverted. The grid promises legibility, yet what it contains is a proliferation of mythic fragments that resist closure. The voyage is here, but dispersed: not a line from point A to point B, but a dense field of potential trajectories, crossings, and collisions. Within the larger context of Fragmenta Deorum, this piece reads as a diagram of how myth circulates in the cultural unconscious. The Argonauts, Jason, the Fleece – all are present only as distributed traces. The map no longer leads us safely through the sea; it exposes how fragile our narratives are when confronted with the sheer complexity of what they try to contain. What remains is a chart of reverberations, a navigational device for a sea made of memory, sculpture and dream.

> 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

> “ARGONAUTICA (Tabula Pelagi)” 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.