FRAGMENTA DEORUM II

+ HECATE  + ARGONAUTICA  + DEA GEMINA + MINOTAURUS + ILIAS +

+ ODYSSEIA + NYMPHAEUM + ILION + METIS +

 

ART PHOTOGRAPHY | CREATIVE CONCEPT | PROJECT

Series Statement

Ὄνειρος

by Alexandru Crișan

FRAGMENTA DEORUM II continues Alexandru Crișan’s investigation into the ways in which myth can be reconfigured once its canonical forms have been broken apart. If the first part of the project established a visual laboratory for the mythic body, this second sequence moves deeper into the mechanics of fragmentation itself – into the ways in which images, like ruins, can be read, misread, and dreamt into new existence. The point of departure remains the same: classical sculpture, reliefs, and mythological scenes that once promised a stable relation between story and form. Yet in FRAGMENTA DEORUM II these sources are subjected to an even more rigorous process of decomposition. Bodies are cut, mirrored, layered, and multiplied through an almost architectural procedure. The result is not a collage in the traditional sense, but a system – a matrix in which each fragment participates in a larger, unstable structure. Crișan works less as an illustrator and more as a designer of visual conditions under which the divine refuses to stay intact.

This second phase of the project makes the semiotic instability of the image fully explicit. Each work is constructed to hover on the threshold between abstraction and figuration. The viewer is drawn into a field of pareidolia, where faces seem to assemble themselves out of marble folds, limbs appear along axes of symmetry, and the suggestion of narrative flickers in and out of view. Recognition becomes provisional, contingent on distance, mood, and even desire. FRAGMENTA DEORUM II does not simply show myth – it stages the act of reading myth, of trying to make sense of fragments that no longer “obey” a single story.

The dream-like quality of these images is not an atmospheric effect, but a structural one. The works behave like oneiric surfaces, where vestiges of Greek and Roman deities circulate without ever fully coalescing. Medeia, Cassiopeia, Hecate, anonymous heroes and goddesses – they are not portrayed, but dispersed across the grid as visual traces. In psychoanalytic terms, these are formations of the unconscious: condensations and displacements of cultural memory. The dream here is not private; it belongs to the Western imaginary itself, whose gods have been formally dethroned but continue to inhabit our visual habits. Crișan’s training as an architect is inscribed in the logic of these compositions. The images can be read as sections through a larger, invisible structure – slices of an impossible monument to lost divinities. Symmetry, repetition, and modular variation function as tools of inquiry rather than decoration. They reveal how easily form can drift from representation into ornament, from body into pattern. At the same time, the works retain a palpable erotic tension: touches, exposures, contorted poses and half-erased gestures remind us that the Greco-Roman pantheon was never purely spiritual. Eros and Thanatos remain embedded in the visual field, even when the figures themselves have been reduced to anonymous fragments.

In FRAGMENTA DEORUM II, the divine is no longer a figure to be recognized, but a logic to be traced. The gods persist as distributions of force across the surface – as densities of repetition, as zones of visual intensity, as echoes that refuse to disappear. The series suggests that what we call “mythology” is not only a corpus of stories, but also a way of organizing images, desires, and hierarchies of meaning. Once those images are decomposed and recomposed, the hierarchies falter. What remains are open configurations, available to new readings.

This second installment of FRAGMENTA DEORUM thus functions as both continuation and displacement. It remains anchored in the same archive of classical forms, yet it pushes them further toward abstraction, toward a state in which the spectator’s act of interpretation becomes central. Crișan offers no key, no definitive decoding. Instead, he provides thresholds – visual situations in which the sacred, the erotic, and the ruinous coexist. The works invite us to consider that mythology may now survive less in its texts than in its fragments; less in its gods than in the way their broken images still organize our seeing. In FRAGMENTA DEORUM II, fragmentation is no longer just a method. It becomes a lens through which the entire tradition of the classical can be reconsidered – not as a finished heritage, but as an ongoing, dream-bound negotiation between memory, image, and desire.

HECATE

(Triplex Anima)

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Tria sunt lumina eius: vita, umbra, et interstitium.

(three are her lights: life, shadow, and the in-between – fragmentum apocryphum)

 

HECATE (Triplex Anima) reimagines the ancient theophoric goddess not as a figure but as a field of distributed presence. The grid becomes a cosmology: a fractured, recursive architecture where marble bodies splinter into hundreds of micro-gestures. In this lattice of repetition and displacement, the classical relief is no longer a narrative surface but a psychic mechanism, a site where fragmentation becomes a mode of revelation. The work draws upon Hecate’s triple form, her dominion over crossroads, thresholds, and lunar transitions. Yet the triadic body here is not depicted; it is inferred through discontinuity. Faces dissolve into torsos, serpentine forms emerge from folds of drapery, and equine limbs flicker like afterimages of Thessalian myth. What remains stable is not identity, but multiplicity: the sense that the image thinks in three directions at once. Through deconstruction and recomposition, the marble becomes porous, almost organic, as if inhabited by the anima mundi, the world-soul that animates all living forms. The mythic archive of Artemis, Diana, Hekatos, and their syncretic shadows is sublimated into a dream-logic where eros and thanatos operate simultaneously. The result is an uncanny surface, rich in pareidolic potentials: witchcraft, moonlit metamorphoses, and Freudian residues appear and vanish depending on the viewer’s position. This is not an illustration of Hecate; it is a method of thinking her. A contemporary re-inscription of the goddess into a visual system that resists linear narration. The sculptural world, so stable in its classical origin, is here subject to dissolution, recompression, and spectral echo. Heroic bodies, serpents, shields, and mythic animals fold into one another until the image becomes a threshold organism – neither sculpture nor photograph, but an experiential matrix of myth, psychoanalysis and metamorphosis. HECATE (Triplex Anima) occupies the territory between coherence and unraveling, between magic and archaeology. It proposes that myth survives not in its stories, but in the patterns of disturbance it continues to generate.

ARGONAUTICA

(Tabula Pelagi)

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Pelagus non legitur nisi in cicatricibus navium.

(the sea is read only in the scars of ships – fragmentum nauticum)

 

ARGONAUTICA (Tabula Pelagi) treats the Argonaut myth not as a heroic narrative, but as a cartography of desire and risk. The classical relief is decomposed into a rigorous grid, an architectural armature onto which fragments of bodies, oars, shields, horses, and waves are re-inscribed. The result resembles less a scene and more a nautical chart: a tabula pelagi, where the voyage toward the Golden Fleece has been translated into a matrix of visual coordinates. The white grid functions simultaneously as constraint and instrument. It recalls the rational structures of architectural drawing, but here the grid does not clarify; it destabilizes. Each square contains a micro-episode, a partial gesture, a torsion of marble. As the eye moves across the surface, these units begin to connect in unpredictable ways: a hand from one cell completes an arm in another, a face seems to reappear at several scales, a hero dissolves into ornament. The image invites pareidolia, pushing the viewer to “navigate” the surface, to reconstruct a route that is no longer given by story but by perception. This work situates the Argonauts within a contemporary discourse on mapping and power. To chart the sea is to claim it, to impose order on what is fluid and indifferent. In ARGONAUTICA (Tabula Pelagi), that impulse toward mastery is both acknowledged and subverted. The grid promises legibility, yet what it contains is a proliferation of mythic fragments that resist closure. The voyage is here, but dispersed: not a line from point A to point B, but a dense field of potential trajectories, crossings, and collisions. Within the larger context of Fragmenta Deorum, this piece reads as a diagram of how myth circulates in the cultural unconscious. The Argonauts, Jason, the Fleece – all are present only as distributed traces. The map no longer leads us safely through the sea; it exposes how fragile our narratives are when confronted with the sheer complexity of what they try to contain. What remains is a chart of reverberations, a navigational device for a sea made of memory, sculpture and dream.

DEA GEMINA

(Tabula Bifrons)

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Duo sunt in me, et ambae verae.

(two dwell in me, and both are true – fragmentum apocryphum)

 

DEA GEMINA (Tabula Bifrons) stages the mythic figure of the “double goddess” as both visual apparition and psychoanalytic construct. The work is built on a strict white grid, yet what inhabits that grid is unstable: a two-headed, bifrontal presence that oscillates between recognition and dissolution. The classical relief has been digitized, fragmented, multiplied, and reassembled into a tiled matrix where every square behaves like a small, disturbed mirror. The title invokes a speculative feminine counterpart to Janus Bifrons and quietly resonates with figures such as Hecate Triformis, the threshold goddess of crossroads and liminal spaces. Here, however, the goddess is not depicted in a conventional mythological pose. She emerges through accumulation: faces that almost coincide along the central axis, doubled torsos, mirrored profiles that never perfectly align. The grid organizes these fragments into a “tabula” – a chart, a diagnostic plate, a specular diagram of a psyche that does not resolve into a single self. Crișan’s architectural training is legible in the modular logic of the composition. The grid promises order, legibility, even control, as in a façade study or a measured drawing. But within each cell, the image behaves otherwise. Bodies are blurred, overlaid, partially rotated; gestures repeat with slight variations, producing a low-frequency vibration across the surface. The viewer’s eye begins to navigate horizontally and vertically, seeking continuity from one square to the next. What results is a form of visual analysis that never quite stabilizes. The goddess is always almost there, articulated by the sum of fragments and yet constantly slipping away. This structure invites a psychoanalytic reading. The piece recalls the specular field of Lacan’s mirror stage, where the subject discovers itself as an image that is both “me” and “other.” In DEA GEMINA (Tabula Bifrons), the double goddess functions as an allegory of that split: the self seen from two incompatible perspectives, conjoined yet divergent. The grid becomes a device for mapping this disjunction. Instead of delivering a unified portrait, it exposes the processes of identification, projection, and misrecognition that underlie any attempt to see oneself – or the divine – as one. Within the broader project of Fragmenta Deorum, this work also continues the series’ archaeology of mythic bodies. Classical sculpture, once a guarantor of stable form, appears here as a field of negotiations: between sacred and profane, masculine and feminine, interior and exterior. The erotic undercurrent is present but diffused; touches, curves, and exposed torsos appear inside the squares, yet no single scene can be isolated. Desire is distributed across the grid, echoing the way religious and psychological projections diffuse themselves across cultural images. DEA GEMINA (Tabula Bifrons) thus operates simultaneously as icon and instrument. It offers a contemporary icon of a two-headed goddess, but it also functions as a tool for thinking about doubling, dissociation, and the impossibility of a fully coherent self. The divine here is not an external guarantor of unity; it is the very form of our internal division, held in place by a fragile matrix of fragments.

MINOTAURUS

(Tabula Labyrinthi)

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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.

ILIAS

(Tabula Heroica)

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Arma virumque redeunt in somnis.

(the arms and the man return in dreams – fragmentum posthomericum)

 

In ILIAS (Tabula Heroica), Alexandru Crișan treats the Trojan War not as a linear tale of siege and vengeance, but as a psychic field – an epic compressed into a single visual plane. The work arranges recomposed fragments of classical relief into a dense, gridded cartography, where war is no longer narrated but mapped. Instead of following Homer’s verses from ship to shore, from rampart to plain, the viewer confronts an all-at-once architecture of conflict: a “table of heroes” in which shields, bodies and gestures have been dissolved into a modular, rhythmic lattice. The grid invokes the rationality of strategy: plans, deployments, formations, the abstract thinking of commanders and architects of war. Yet this rational surface is constantly disrupted by the intensity of the fragments it holds. Within each cell, traces of impact, supplication, charge and collapse flicker at the edge of legibility. Author’s training as an architect is evident in the control of repetition and alignment, but the work refuses to resolve into a stable diagram. It behaves more like a memory palace after catastrophe-ordered in principle, unstable in experience. From a psychoanalytic perspective, the piece can be read as an image of repetition compulsion. The scenes of attack, defense and intertwined bodies do not unfold; they recur. The eye moves across them the way the mind returns, obsessively, to unresolved scenes. Freud’s insight that trauma is lived belatedly finds here a visual analogue: the war has already happened, but its echo continues to organize perception. Lacan’s notion that the subject is “spoken” by the symbolic order is mirrored by the way the figures are caught in the grid’s logic, endlessly replaying their gestures inside an imposed structure. At the same time, ILIAS (Tabula Heroica) engages with the long afterlife of Homeric imagery in Western art. The heroic nude, the rearing horse, the shield as emblem of both protection and exposure – these are not simply quoted; they are folded into a new syntax. The work acknowledges how the Trojan cycle has provided, for centuries, a vocabulary for thinking about power, desire, loss and divine interference. But instead of illustrating episodes, the author lets the motifs collide. The divine and the human, the glorious and the abject, occupy the same level of the image, flattened into a shared, shimmering skin of marble. The dream logic central to the Fragmenta Deorum series is fully present here. The composition is not designed to be “read” from left to right or top to bottom; it is entered. Pareidolia becomes a method of viewing: faces emerge where there are none, shields turn into eyes, horses into vortices of motion. The work offers no single hero, no privileged vantage point, only the continuous murmur of myth under pressure. The epic survives, but in the form of fragments that require the viewer’s participation to cohere into meaning.

ODYSSEIA

(Tabula Gorgonis)

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Monstrum est signum quod somnus legit.

(a monster is a sign that sleep can read – fragmentum apocryphum)

 

ODYSSEIA (Tabula Gorgonis) positions the Homeric voyage as a psychological structure rather than a narrative itinerary. In the classical tradition, the journey is never only geographic; it is a machine for transformation, a theatre in which identity is dismantled and reassembled under the pressure of trials, prohibitions, seductions, and returns. In this work, that itinerary is translated into an image-logic governed by dream: not linear progression, but recurrence; not explanation, but condensation; not stable meaning, but a field of shifting correspondences. The subtitle Tabula Gorgonis frames the work as an epistemic plate: a surface that does not “tell the story” but catalogues its forces. The Gorgon here functions less as a mythological character and more as a structural limit within representation itself. In Greco-Roman iconography, the gorgoneion is both protective and catastrophic: a sign placed on armour and thresholds to repel harm, yet also a sign that arrests the viewer – an emblem of the gaze that cannot be endured without consequence. In psychoanalytic terms, this double function is crucial. The Gorgon condenses attraction and interdiction, Eros and Thanatos, into a single figure of symbolic intensity. It marks the point where desire approaches what it cannot assimilate. Freud’s account of dream-work clarifies the operative mechanism. Dreams do not invent ex nihilo; they reorganise. They condense disparate residues into composite forms, displace affect onto substitute images, and produce a manifest surface that both reveals and conceals the latent logic beneath it. ODYSSEIA (Tabula Gorgonis) advances this principle as method. Classical sculpture – already a cultural memory-object, already a residue – becomes further decomposed and recomposed until it behaves like a dream-text: legible, yet never exhausted by a single reading. The grid operates as a rationalising screen: an architectural device that imposes order while simultaneously emphasising fragmentation, as if the image were being held together by an analytic framework that cannot fully stabilise what it contains. The work also permits a Lacanian reading of the gaze. What returns in the “Gorgon” is not merely the fear of looking, but the anxiety of being looked at by the image – by the symbolic itself. The viewer’s interpretive impulse, the desire to fix meaning, meets a surface that continually redistributes signifiers. Myth becomes a language that refuses closure. The Odyssey’s core motif – return – reappears here as psychic compulsion: a repeated circling around an unresolved kernel. In Jungian terms, the work activates archetypal material not as illustration but as structure: the Shadow as what is repudiated yet persistent; the threshold as what divides the civilised from the monstrous; the voyage as individuation performed through fracture rather than harmony. ODYSSEIA (Tabula Gorgonis) therefore functions as contemporary archaeology in a strict sense: it excavates not “antiquity” but the psychic infrastructure antiquity continues to supply. It is contemporary art precisely because it treats the classical canon as a living archive—mutable, reprogrammable, susceptible to reconfiguration under modern perceptual and theoretical conditions. The image does not ask the viewer to recognise a scene; it asks the viewer to recognise a mechanism: how myths persist when belief has dissolved, how forms survive as afterimages, how the sacred returns as a semiotic disturbance inside the dream.

NYMPHAEUM

(Tabula Nymphaei)

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Hic latent numina.

(here the divinities lie hidden)

 

NYMPHAEUM (Tabula Nymphaei) treats the classical nymph as a principle of recurrence: the way the ancient world continues to inhabit the modern psyche as rhythm, allure, and symbolic residue. The title frames the work as a tabula—not a picture in the descriptive sense, but a table of correspondences, an organised field where fragments behave like signs. Crișan’s grid is not merely a formal device: it echoes the logics of archival order, architectural modularity, and the taxonomies through which cultures attempt to contain what is essentially fluid – water, desire, myth. In the broader grammar of FRAGMENTA DEORUM, the Greco-Roman canon is not approached as “heritage” but as a malleable archive. Crișan dismantles the authority of the single image and replaces it with a structured multiplicity: an engine for pareidolia, association, and subjective reading. This is where the oneiric becomes operative. Freud described the dream as a work of transformation – material is rearranged so that what cannot be said may nonetheless appear. Jung argued that myth is dream thinking at a civilisational scale. Lacan insisted that desire is articulated through structures that exceed the individual. NYMPHAEUM aligns with these propositions: it positions myth as a living system of signs that continues to organise the contemporary gaze. The nymphic world – groves, springs, serpentine energies, pastoral femininity – functions here as an archetypal attractor. It draws the viewer into a mode of looking that is interpretive rather than consumptive. The work refuses a single reading, because its subject is precisely the instability of meaning: how beauty is never only aesthetic, but also psychological; how “nature” is never only landscape, but also fantasy; how the sacred does not vanish, but migrates – into form, repetition, and the private theatre of the mind. In NYMPHAEUM, the classical returns as a disciplined hallucination: an image made to be read, not solved.

ILION

(Tabula Dolii)

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Hic Ilion non cadit: mutat nomen. Dolus non est arma – sed forma signi. Qui legit, pugnat; qui videt, somniat.

(here Ilion does not fall: it changes its name. deceit is not a weapon — but the form of a sign. who reads, fights; who sees, dreams.)

 

ILION (Tabula Dolii) situates the Trojan epic inside the logic of the dream: not as narration, but as a field of operations. The title proposes Ilion as a place remembered through stratified signs, while dolus (deceit, stratagem) names the specific intelligence of the Iliadic world – an intelligence that does not merely win battles, but rearranges meaning itself. In this work, Alexandru Crișan treats the epic not as an illustration to be restored, but as a classical archive to be re-coded: fractured, mirrored, and reassembled into a contemporary image-system whose primary content is interpretation. The grid is not a decorative device; it functions as a tabula – a scored surface, an architectural instrument, and a taxonomic frame. As an architect, Crișan approaches the mythic corpus the way one approaches a ruin: through measured segmentation, through controlled cuts that reveal how the whole is manufactured. The “battle” becomes legible as a syntax rather than a scene. The epic is translated into modules, and the modules become signs that migrate across the surface, producing a continual oscillation between recognition and uncertainty. This is precisely where FRAGMENTA DEORUM locates its contemporary charge: the work is less interested in what the myth says than in how myth persists as an operative structure in the visual unconscious. Read through psychoanalytic optics, dolus aligns with the dream-work itself. Freud describes dreams as condensations and displacements; here, the classical canon is treated in the same manner – compressed, rerouted, and redistributed until it no longer obeys linear storytelling. What remains is the compulsion of return: motifs and gestures recur with the insistence of the repressed. Lacan’s emphasis on the Symbolic clarifies the stakes: Ilion is not only a city in ruins, but a name that organizes desire and violence, a signifier that circulates long after its historical referent dissolves. The grid intensifies this condition: it resembles an index, yet it refuses the stability of an index. It promises ordering while staging its failure, leaving the viewer to negotiate what, exactly, is being “catalogued” – heroism, brutality, seduction, sacrifice, or the very desire to assign a single meaning. This is where Umberto Eco becomes an essential companion. ILION (Tabula Dolii) behaves as an open work: it activates a plurality of readings without collapsing into arbitrariness. The image is disciplined – architectonic, rigorous – yet semantically mobile. It invites the viewer to operate as Eco’s model reader: to mobilize an encyclopaedia of cultural memory (epic fragments, museum sculpture, archetypal forms) while remaining aware of the limits of interpretation. Dolus, in this sense, is also semiotic: it is the condition in which signs do not simply denote, but misdirect, seduce, and multiply. The work is a map of interpretive tension – between what appears to be given and what must be constructed by looking. Within the broader logic of FRAGMENTA DEORUM, ILION (Tabula Dolii) proposes a contemporary archaeology of war as an image-technology. It acknowledges that the Trojan cycle is not only a story about conflict, but a machine for producing cultural forms: the hero, the victim, the trophy, the omen, the ritual. Crișan’s recomposition does not moralize these forms; it subjects them to a new regime of visibility. The grid, like a forensic lens, both distances and intensifies. It cools the epic into analysis, while allowing its dream – residue – its erotic charge, its sacred violence, its theatre of fate – to persist as a haunting pressure beneath the surface.

METIS

(Tabula Doni)

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Metis donum dat: donum mentem movet. Non res traditur, sed signum. Qui interpretatur, vigilat in somno.

(metis gives the gift: the gift moves the mind. not a thing is handed over, but a sign. who interprets stays awake in sleep.)

 

Metis names the intelligence that does not conquer by force, but by arrangement: a knowledge of thresholds, reversals, delays, and perfectly timed offerings. In the Trojan cycle, the “gift” is never innocent; it is a sign that enters the city before the army does. Read through Freud, the gift behaves like dream-work – condensation and displacement, a parcel that carries more than it claims. For Lacan, it becomes the signifier par excellence: what is offered is less an object than a position in desire. In Umberto Eco’s terms, Tabula Doni stages an open field where meaning is not delivered but negotiated – an encyclopaedia of possible readings, each viewer assembling their own Trojan archive. The work thus proposes dolos as an epistemology: not moral failure, but a method by which myth survives, mutates, and returns – each time under a new name, each time asking to be interpreted rather than believed.

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

Artifex

Alexandru Crișan (b. Bucharest, Romania 1978) is a visual artist interested in the existential complementarity of objective and nonobjective forms of expression. 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. Most of his long-term, open-ended photographic series – such as “Minimal White / Minimal Black”, or “Lost Highway / My Car is Your Avatar” – are meditations on loci and human perceptions. The research on and within photography gradually afforded him a surreal vision of immateriality, which he debonairly likes to describe as “tormenting several stages of a hyperrealist mise en abyme”. Since 2015, he developed quite a few “meta-projects”: “Erotoarchitecture”, “Metropoesis”, “Hortus Conclusus”, “Alex Transcends the Balkans for a Bottle of Perfume”, “Mechaniarchy” and “Shoah”, under the compelling awareness and besetting exploration of otherness and of self. 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.

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