BOOK DETAILS:

Published images for the series

“And love is nothing more than a name for our passionate desire to be whole again. Whole as I said we were from the beginning and not divided in our own being, split, for our presumptuousness, by Zeus […]. It is, therefore, to be feared that if we sin against the gods, we will be split once again, like firebrands, so that we walk, like people who are seen in profile, in bas-relief, on tombstones, cut from top to bottom along the line of the nose.” (Plato, The Banquet, translation by Petru Creția, Humanitas, 2011, 192e-193a, pg. 116)

This is not a fortuitous photograph.

This is a conspiracy. Since I have known it, my city has been gradually re-calculating its heels, in a concert of the contingencies of post-communist convalescence. It is a citadel in which together it seems to have calibrated its ideal via Brâncuși’s “The Kiss”, in a calm desperation, in a measured eroticism; it is completed by a grip synonymous with a trap, only that its “signalectic” seems stingy and hungry, begging for an anachronistic lighting. It is hard to find architectural arms that unite landmarks and points of view!

This is not a photograph of my city.

In my city, the architectural details are aortic. Metropolitan peristalsis is a barcode scarred in decayed concrete. Living spaces only have sweat glands. Office buildings only have deltoids. Somehow, the two typologies only touch their pelvises.

This is, however, a functional architectural detail photo in which together means a sought-after, non-delicate, yet anti-gravitational touch, which allows for a synchronized vertigo: two resistance structures that seem to tense each other at a 15-degree angle, with an extended epidermis that parametrically sinks towards a Scandinavian sun with canines, and which allows for an inclusive transfer of penumbra, but does not approve of confusing crowding with intimacy.

This is an architectural detail photo: Bella Sky Hotel, built by 3XN in Ørestad, Copenhagen.

PS: – schesis s [At: VĂCĂRESCUL. IST. 289 / Pl: ? / E: ngr σχέσις] (Grî) Relationship established between things, facts, events, etc. (cf. dexonline.ro)

– conspiracy (etymology): con = together, spirare = to breathe

Awards Page:

https://alexandru-crisan.com/architecture-master-prize-2025-winner-honorable-mention-los-angeles-us/

Competition Page:

https://architectureprize.com/

Artist Bio/CV

Alexandru Crișan (b. Bucharest, Romania 1978) is a visual artist interested in the existential complementarity of objective and nonobjective forms of expression. To resolve the former, he is an architect. As far as the latter is to be unpacked, his “counter-professional” career in photography began in 2008; his paintings stand, for almost three decades, as the most intimate, borderline atavistic, acts of divulgence. Assuming that taxonomy is of any consequence, he is partial to fine-art photography and Abstract Expressionism. The eclectic nature of his projects is, therefore, a given. His photography is a direct result of compulsive visual disquisitions on impromptu portraiture, architectural equivocations, parametric manipulations, “hybrid storytelling” and evocative conservationism. Crișan’s works have been presented in over 50 international exhibitions, have been published in over 100 peer-reviewed magazines, have received over 500 international awards and nominations, and are part of several privately owned collections and art galleries.