“I’ve called the consequential symbiosis “Brutalisme lyrique”. It “simply” indicates a filiation in which the Abstraction Lyrique is a phenomenological motherly figure, while the nybrutalism may claim ontological paternal custody, yet the – ultimately needed – IVF-like metabolic praxeology is delivering the visceral coherence.” (Alexandru Crisan, January 2022)

Entropy is an eschatological murmuration. Surrendering to its cooling protectorate (and its dull, dire dare) will force an artist to either freeze or flock amok (since artists and groupishness don’t mix very well). This is a diptych about the Second Law of Thermodynamics and (objective) tinnitus.

Appendix

In any portrait, chromatic nutrients are sapped (more or less involuntarily) by the understanding of the fact that any (untainted) natural process has a (dubious, but unescapable) destination, and that back-tracking is a (labyrinthine) illusion. Deciding on the size of your canvases becomes (counterintuitively) trivial, considering that the (rather) inevitable transfer and transformation of energy will only lead to more and more (and more and more) (of its) waste. These are the Physics–rooted reasons why I’ve started this painting (and, in fact, the entire “Entropy” series) with an en Brunaille intent.  But the deluge of potential nuances overwhelmed the coherence of my work, so stratification (and sublimation) became paramount. As an architect, I feel at ease tinkering with Sgraffito “frequency responses”. I wanted to propagate them into the acrylic. Only a Brutalist resolve stopped me from overwhelming you with ornamental clues that would have artificially increased the musicality of this work. But I wanted this painting to reverberate like Arvo Part’s Kanon Pokajanen, not like Bach’s Goldberg Variations. Just as I wanted it to smell like adulterated metropolitan snow, and not like a pastoral summer rain. If my chromatic impulsiveness was nurtured by Caravaggio (Polidoro da, to be precise), it came to terms with itself once (K) Malevich lowered my heartbeat. And trapped inside this trek, there is a (achromatic and ominous) susurration. One can hear it in Rome, outside the Palazzo Massimo Istoriato, just as loudly as one can hear it while crashing White on White. I hear it in this work, too. I think it holds an aviary panache that describes one’s (orderly) aging migration, which, in turn, puts a swooshing spin on one’s solipsism. In short, otology trumps ontology. However (once you’ve open your eyes again), parenthesis trapped the only truths that mattered, for they were as fungible as stained-glass shards, and the artist – their jailor, who craved the catharsis of a “Brutalisme lyrique” – neglected to set them free, too.

Entropy is an eschatological foxhole (where, allegedly, no atheists are to be found…). Mapping out its versatility (and its axal, arid atoms) can trick an artist into either psychosomatic solipsism or holistic amok. This is a diptych about homeostasis and dysthymia (aka, persistent depressive disorder).

Appendix

I’ve started this painting as a reaction to Robert Smithson’s “Enantiomorphic Chambers”. As an architect, my interest in Smithson’s work pinpointed the dialectic nature of his “Nonsites”, and his take on biomorphism – a subject I’ve studied extensively via Frank Lloyd Wright.  My problem, nevertheless, was that of equilibrium representation – a subject I’ve started to consider crucial only in my mid 30s: it was the logic of the dynamic essence of balance that, ultimately, is to be found at the core of any sense of identification/identity. This kinetic metanarrative offered me the academic tools to explain both the fungible nature of Smithson’s working mediums, and Wright’s neoplastic condemnation of urban developments. It also contradicted, to a certain extent, my sense of purposeless despair (and the obsessive guilt derived from any linear cosmology that may be associated with the idea of entropy). Furthermore, it put a stochastic spin on my artistic work, thus doubling-down on my recurrent sarcasm triggered by the incontinent misnomer “generative art”... However, what is of outmost importance, it allowed the hope of a meta-self-regulatory process that would maintain a relatively stable internal functionality, in spite of evolutionary dead-ends. It afforded me the ontological homeostasis that I’ve previously doubted. Imperfect POVs prove irrelevant when one tries to isolate the chromatic reverberation that discriminates random dynamics from chaotic alliterations. In short, I was trying to capture the irregularities of time, for a very egotistic reason: they affect me the most!

To summarize, completing this soi-disant “Brutalisme lyrique” acrylic fortification helped me escape my own anxiety-carved fosses, and made mirrors meaningless. And it also echoes Hilma af Klint: “Less selfishness, more indifference”.

Entropy is an eschatological dog whistle. Understanding its immanence (and its cranky, cruel call) can push an artist to either play dead or run amok. This polyptych is my kneejerk reaction to it, echoed in heavy rotation for almost four years.

Appendix

The thing is, all such ontological vivisections are exclusively performed on personal pronouns. They require scalpels: Talmudic, Aristotelian, Spinozist, Freudian, Biblical… In my case, the only anesthetic allowed is terebinthine. Surgical textbooks are so heavily codified (and priced!) that one needs to settle for blueprints: from the fingermarks cathartically integrated into the mondmilch of the Pech-Merle cave ceilings, to the Outrenoir metonymically masticated by Pierre Soulages. And, at the end of the day(s), after you have opened your residual self like a book (one that was heavily edited by your genitors – the very one you’re planning to use as a hand-me-down peace offering to your offspring), the only Dantesque hope you can muster is that some sort of postmortem polychromatic transubstantiation will ensue. Of course, such maladaptive narcissism, which borderlines idolatry, is at the very core of the impulse to misinterpret the Socratic dictum “The unexamined life is not worth living“. However, just as Brutalist monumentalities seem to require only banal gravitational pull to irk the drizzle of time, and just as Abstraction Lyrique selfies seem to rely solipsistically on the centrifugal decomposition of randomly-clustered photons, so too the amour-de-soi needs nothing but a heartbeat. Alas, sophistication and consequential sophistry are pure BS when it comes the unidirectional flow of survival (and, consequently, of grief), hence the title of this work.

Entropy is an eschatological quiver. Trusting its scalability (and its sexy, slow swag) can coalesce into cathartic contraband the chills, the cobras, the cartridges and all the other curios an artist may either dread in sweaty terrors or tread in sheer defiance. This triptych is about misophonia and Third Law of Thermodynamics.

Appendix

This chapter of my Entropy series is the most cinematic of them all. It denudes an ever-eroding obsession for inwardness that sets it apart from – and even pits me against – the pareidolic fascinations that drone photography got us hooked on during the legacy Web 2.0 heyday. It is a macro-snapshot of an absurdist pathway mapping – from around 10.000 Kelvin towards a temperature of 0 Kelvin (−273.15 °C). It’s also an ouroboros-shaped blueprint (true catnip for all the architects worth their salt!) for constant decay, or a wet collodion flux effigy on existential kobaltblau plates.

I started this paining imagining a vivisection of residual entropy – which I understood as a visual compulsion to gain the measure of an ontological “exit disorder” on an enlarged spectrum, frozen formlessness included. Hence the neoplastic ice and the burlesque indeterminacy of its hydrogen atoms loci. Because where there’s ice, there’s geometry, and therefore a chance for chaos, as well as for a floating equilibrium. And there’s also the ominous pitter-patter and apotheotic hiss of ice-breaking – the ones that may trigger the fight/flight/freeze potentialities in any eschatologically-minded (yet soteriologically-neutral) artist. Consequently, this is a painting laced with norepinephrine, adrenaline and cortisol.

So I’ve aimed at trapping some “prequel light” between 0 Kelvin beams, some “acrylic consonants” in copper foundations, and, hopefully, even some “stray brain-waves” within gold-leaved periderms. And then there’s the myriad of blue(s). It could have been only a splash of International Klein Blue, but I’ve never looked UP in search for pairings; instead, I’ve trusted only my own empiricist marrow. Additionally, I was more interested in a subversive aerial perspective, in the tradition of Leonardo da Vinci or Jan Brueghel the Elder, then in a faux conservationist axiology à la Mishka Henner. I kept reviewing Mark Rothko’s No. 61 (Rust and Blue) and Georgia O’Keeffe’s Abstraction Blue. I found that typological silence heartening. I kept rerunning Werner Herzog (“Scream of Stone”, 1991; “The Wild Blue Yonder”, 2005; ”Cave of Forgotten Dreams”, 2010), Terrence Malick (“To the Wonder”, 2012; “Voyage of Time”, 2016) and Victor Kossakovsky (“Aquarela”, 2018). I found those silences rousing as well. To put it differently, in this work, I was testing the obliqueness afforded by a “soul hypothesis”, not the orthodoxy of a bird’s-eye view inherent to the “Gaia paradigm”. And this hypothesis is, in fact, at the very core of the “Brutalisme lyrique” that I’m “peddling”.

Entropy is an eschatological blessing. Counting on its recurrence (and its cozy, clean cusp) may sedate an artist into becoming either the unicorn chaser or the uchonian chastiser the rest of the species ridicules. This is a work about hortus conclusus and the Zeroth Law of Thermodynamics.

Appendix

The “Brutalisme lyrique” that I’m rooting & exploiting affords a synthesis in which the materialism of the architectural act and the idealism of the acrylic burst spot each other in an existential workout with, alas, negligible soteriological payoff. At the end of such a sweltering deadlift routine, one ought to wonder: is there no taming of that “disorderly exist” which chips away at one’s atoms?

Consequently, in this painting, I’ve tried to cheat entropy (which is, caeteris paribus, a three people job!).

My first abettor: James Clerk Maxwell, the 19^th century Scottish scientist whose groundbreaking work on electromagnetic radiation singled out electricity, magnetism and light – which are, incidentally, three crucial variables in this painting: all you need to do is transpose your POV, and you will notice a de Chirico phenomenology to it… Maxwell gloriously postulated: “All heat is of the same kind”, and imagined a theoretical routeway (via his so-called “demon” hypothesis – which could prove viable in nanoscale systems, similar to the one you are seeing right now) towards defining temperature without engaging entropy. My conundrum was if the same could be done with “color monumentalities”: could I express the rather abnormal heat exchange between the “I” (aka, the painter) and the “We” (aka, the viewer) without engaging the reality of the dead-end inevitability?

My second confederate: Șerban Țițeica, the 20^th century founder of the Romanian School of Theoretical Physics, thanks to whom I understood that my problem was one of (thermo)dynamic transitivity, not of equilibrium stability… Consequently, what I needed to disregard was a geometric impulse of balance. Moreover, I had to surrender the attempt to control the viewers’ psychosomatic equilibrium…

In Physics, a solution becomes available once the notion of “diathermal walls” comes into play: we are using boundaries that allow the transfer of heat, but not of matter. In Art, the closest we got to these walls is the hortus conclusus. From the “Song of Songs” to Fra Angelico, from the Pompeii peristyles to Peter Zumthor’s 2011 Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, from The Orto Botanico at Padua and the Cistercian Monastery of Le Thoronet to the works of the elusive Upper Rhenish Master, there is always a locus amoenus to be cloistered with such craftsmanship, that would allow only the very best part of us (a soul, perhaps…) to find trespassing & transcendent solace.

No wonder one can find unicorns, a Mother of God, a Tree of Life, a Fountain of Youth or endless luminous emanations in such enclosed gardens! No wonder, therefore, that my painting was instead influenced conceptually by Hieronymus Bosch, and technically by (the later works of) John Hoyland. And then I’ve simply zoomed in, focusing on discrete vibratos, similar to the ones I recall from my adolescence, when I was discovering Górecki’s “Symphony of Sorrowful Songs”.

However, there if a catch: without entropy, there is no solace to be touched. Without entropy, there is only an incoherent mise en abyme that no amount of beton-brut may shelter from narcissistic inertia. So an alternative description of this work could be: “The tree sought refuge in the leaf, the house in the door, and the city in the house. The same scene over and over. The tree became a leaf, the house a door, and the city a house. It was hard to see all that and not seek refuge in my hands.” (“Fando y Lis”, 1968, Alejandro Jodorowsky – based on the play by Fernando Arrabal).

I’m an idiosyncratic artist with a penchant for dynamic coalescences. I’ve started pondering about the “asymmetry of time” after a deeply personal loss in 2017. The exorcizing premeditation of my work was being tainted somehow by technical conundrums: I was preoccupied by an alla prima acrylic synthesis, by Caravaggio’s “impasto a corpo”, and by Jean-Paul Riopelle’s palette-knife(d) syncopated cacophonies. Finding my way out of such (seductively engineering) circumstantiality-echoes called for a methodological U-turn. The exit strategy became a roadmap once such adapted “acrylic syllables” found their groupishess within egotistic – yet melioristic – “rhymes” (and not default words/pigments) and then into beton-brut “verses” (i.e., not lukewarm sentences/textures). To put it differently, I now act as a painter (abstract, perhaps) and I final-cut as an architect (deconstructivist, probably).

Let me unpack this approach by pointing out several key-elements of my work, rooted in architectural tenets: I’m interested in sculptural theses, not in reactionary chroma-stasis; in gravitational mergers, not in inertial continuities; in the tactile, not in the penumbra; in the self-sustainable monumentality, not in the anthropomorphic ephemera; in metabolism, not in siestas; in anagrams, not in metaphors; in the tectonic, not in the mimetic; in the macroscopic synthesis, not in the sartorial minutiae.

I’ve called the consequential symbiosis “Brutalisme lyrique”. It “simply” indicates a filiation in which the Abstraction Lyrique is a phenomenological motherly figure, while the nybrutalism may claim ontological paternal custody, yet the – ultimately needed – IVF-like metabolic praxeology is delivering the visceral coherence.

To double-down on the architectural faux jargon, this genealogy includes several distant cousins: stereotomy, Sgraffito techniques and came glassworks – they are slices of the crafts that configure my creative process. This “pedigree” sprouts mechanics of integrated/geometricized POVs, isometric rustications in acrylic camouflage, and cyclopean alliterations – all weaved into amoral dreamcatchers and a Newtonian fluxions mise-en-scène.

I am using such terminology to indicate that I’m hunting for perceptions, not normative standards. In fact, I completely reject the ethical realism instilled into the core of the New Brutalism (à la Peter and Alison Smithson, the Hunstanton Robin Hood Gardens architects). I aim not to preach towards political/ urbanistic praxes, but to discover (in Platonist sense) perfectible, immersive geometric idioms, to bottleneck chroma-spatiality, and to use seemingly impacted dermis as a defensive layer against the entropic “arrow of time”. Additionally, I’m rejecting dogmatic illusions (à la Georges Mathieu) of coincidental pseudo-geometrical outputs and non-cognitive kinetic blueprints. I do not want to surrender to some extirpative psychosomatic fits which need perpetual contextualization. What I do what is to domesticate any affectual monumentality I can parameterize within acrylic details, and to use the cracks of paint and the dents of the 91.7% pure gold leaves (or silver, or copper – just not variegated leaves!) to multiply the hinges and the joints of one’s own identity – while testing the boundaries of Physiology and Physics with uchronian intent.

Finally (i.e., eschatologically speaking – pun intended!), I hunt for a psyche-transliterating, borderline somatic expressivity, rooted, nevertheless, in a utilitarian purifying télos – the crudity of which marches in lockstep with its purposefully irregular reflections. I believe the selected works from my “Entropy” series that I’m submitting for your review are reflecting touchstones of my detailed approach.

Copyright © Alexandru Crisan 2022. All rights reserved. All images and texts featured on this website are under strict copyright regulations and require a license for reproduction in print or online. Any artwork cannot be used without written consent from its author. Please note that any unauthorized use of images from this website is in breach of copyright regulations. Detailed informations TERMS OF USE.