METIS R.2 (Fragmenta Doni)

> about the image:

Donum manet: sensus fugit. Metis non celat—multiplicat. Somnus est lex interpretationis.

(the gift remains: meaning flees. metis does not conceal – it multiplies. sleep is the law of interpretation.)

Here, Metis is not the architect of a single ruse but the patron of unstable messages: a cunning that works by remainder, by residue, by what persists after the narrative has “ended”. In Jungian terms, the gift resembles an archetypal lure – an emissary from the collective imagination that crosses into the personal dream without asking permission. Umberto Eco’s semiotics sharpens the dilemma: a sign is never solitary; it calls other signs, other stories, other lists. The “gift” therefore expands into an infinite catalogue of associations – heroic, erotic, devotional, violent – without settling into a final key. This is precisely the point: the Trojan mechanism is not a historical trick but a recurring psychic structure. What is offered is a passage: from certainty to reading, from possession to interpretation. The work becomes a contemporary reliquary of myth-museum-like in its presence, but deliberately unfinished in its meanings, so the viewer’s own oneiric logic completes the circuit.

p.s. Mētis is Odysseus’ “cunning intelligence” (the intelligence of stratagems rather than force), while donum preserves the Trojan “gift” as an unstable sign.

> 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

> “METIS R.2 (Fragmenta Doni)” 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.