ABOUT me:

“Qualis artifex pereo…” IF ever there is a germane moment in an artist’s life to take Nero, the fifth Emperor of Rome, seriously, and, consequently, to try to correctly translate his words, it is precisely during a pandemic!

I am a visual storyteller who dissects perceptions and deconstructs mythologies. The five works that I am submitting for your review were created between December 2019 and August 2021. They are the offspring of a “cordon sanitaire” that challenged my cloistered creative impulses to the brink of burnout. On the sunny side of the process, my decade-long interest in a multifaceted abstract expressionism was nurtured by the “cordon solitaire” that the COVID-19 “Q”uarantine imposed upon me. I think that, for any artist, obsession is coherence, even more so when his senses are under siege. My own coherence was driven by a documentarian impulse coupled with an identity reconstruction: you will be “reading”, in fact, selected pages from an “acrylic journal”, warts and all… Incidentally, I’ve always thought that reading between the lines, no matter how blurred their askew edges, is the key to immersive empathic analogies – especially when it comes to the lyrical abstractions that connect egos and souls (in this particular case, hopefully, mine and yours…).

The fact is, I have put crayon, charcoal or brush to paper or canvas for as long as I can remember, always obsessed with geometries and color resonance, subsequently fascinated by the transpositions I was imposing upon them by toying with the light switch in my room. When I was about 12 years old, I have received my very first photo camera. It was a Zenit E, which I have took apart within hours and, of course, failed to put back together for weeks on end – a borderline fatalistic compulsion, very similar to the noxious process that breeds the chromatic “alchemy” of my paintings.  What followed were the years when natural light became my “governess”. A decade after that, as a professional architect, the logic of the obsession turned out to be the taming of both artificial and natural light between blocks of concrete and sheets of glass.

The sum of those successive inception points and ensuing pathways, together with over 15 years of fine-art photography experimentations, pushed me towards the artistic anxieties the “chromatic exorcism” of which you are seeing in my artworks. (Alexandru Crisan, 20021)”

ABOUT Luxembourg Art Prize Competition:

“The Luxembourg Art Prize is an annual international artistic prize organized by the Pinacothèque, a private museum located in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. The Luxembourg Art Prize aims to reveal and promote talented artists who have yet to establish a profile on the contemporary international scene. Its function is to discover artists, and it is open to any artist, amateur or professional, with no limits on age, nationality or place of residence. The Prize is aimed at artists working in one or more of the following media: drawing, printing, installation, painting, photography, sculpture, mixed media, decorative art (textiles and material, glass, wood, metal, ceramics, mosaic, paper or other techniques).“