MINOTAURUS (Tabula Labyrinthi)

> about the image:

Qui monstrum quaerit, se ipsum invenit.

(who seeks the monster finds himself – fragmentum psychoanalyticum)

In MINOTAURUS (Tabula Labyrinthi), Alexandru Crișan treats the myth of the Minotaur not as an episode from Greek legend, but as an architectural model for the unconscious. The work stages a collision between two orders: the animal and the constructed, the drive and the diagram. Classical reliefs are decomposed into a rigorously gridded surface, producing something that operates less like an image and more like a plan – a labyrinth rendered as a mental cartography rather than a physical space. The mythic Minotaur, half man and half bull, has often been read as a figure of excess: unruly sexuality, divine violence, the terror of unassimilated instinct. Crișan’s work redirects that excess into structure. Instead of a single body imprisoned at the center of a maze, we encounter a field in which fragments of bodies, shields, weapons and gestures circulate in a controlled repetition. The “monster” is no longer localized; it is diffused through the entire system. In Freudian terms, the drive has been repressed into form. The labyrinth is not the container of the monstrous – it is the monstrous, translated into geometry. The grid recalls both the rational discipline of architectural drawing and the modernist dream of total order. Yet here that order is undermined from within. The more one scans the surface, the more unstable it becomes: figures appear, dissolve, reconfigure, as if the eye itself were wandering through corridors of condensed and displaced memory. Lacan’s subject, always chasing meaning in the shifting chain of signifiers, finds a visual analogue in this restless scanning. There is no clear entrance, no privileged center, no promise of exit. Orientation gives way to circulation. At the same time, Jung’s language of archetypes hovers behind the work. The bull, the warrior, the victim, the hero – all are present as traces rather than illustrations. MINOTAURUS (Tabula Labyrinthi) proposes that what we call “myth” is not a finished narrative but a set of recurring configurations in the psyche, endlessly recomposed. The grid becomes a contemporary oracle board upon which these configurations are cast and recast, inviting projection rather than prescribing interpretation. Within the broader Fragmenta Deorum cycle, this piece functions as a key diagram: a map of how divine and human, sacred and violent, are processed by contemporary visual culture. Crișan, trained as an architect and working through photography, uses decomposition and recomposition to probe the limits of representation. The work refuses both nostalgia for antiquity and simple iconoclasm. Instead, it offers a precise, oneiric machine in which the Minotaur survives not as a creature in the center, but as a pattern distributed across the entire image – a labyrinth that dreams.

> 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

> “MINOTAURUS (Tabula Labyrinthi)” 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.