FRAGMENTA DEORUM R.2 functions as the series’ second inscription: not a sequel, but a return. If the earlier chapters propose an archaeology of the mythic body, R.2 foregrounds what archaeology cannot fully control – the afterimage, the revision, the psychic remainder that persists once the “find” has already been catalogued.

Somnium non repetit: re-scribit.
(a dream does not repeat: it rewrites – fragmentum apocryphum)

In this register, “R.2” is best understood as recensio: a critical re-reading of the same material under altered conditions of visibility. The classical canon is approached again as a malleable archive, but here the emphasis falls on its instability – on the way myth returns through distortion, mirroring, compression, and drift. These works operate like secondary dream formations: the mind’s attempt to organise fragments after the fact, producing a surface that appears structured while remaining governed by displacement and condensation. Alexandru Crișan’s method remains architectural in its intelligence. As an architect, he treats the image not as a window but as a constructed field: a plane organised by modules, axes, repetitions, thresholds, and structural symmetries. Yet R.2 intensifies the tension between system and excess. The compositional lattice – whether explicit or latent – functions as a taxonomic apparatus: a grid of classification, a diagram of control. At the same time, the figure resists that apparatus. The classical body re-enters not as an icon restored to coherence, but as a signal repeatedly reconfigured, multiplied, and partially erased. What emerges is a disciplined volatility: order used to expose the limits of ordering.

The perceptual engine of the series – pareidolia – becomes more explicit in R.2 as a theoretical position. These works are built to activate the viewer’s interpretive impulse: the compulsion to recognise, to stabilise, to name. But recognition here is never final; it is continuously renegotiated. The image behaves like a semiotic field in which signifiers circulate without settling into a single reading. In contemporary terms, this is not a decorative ambiguity; it is a critique of myth as fixed meaning. Crișan relocates mythology from narrative certainty into interpretive labour. The spectator is not a receiver of story but a producer of significance, moving across a surface where the “divine” is distributed rather than depicted. This is where psychoanalysis becomes more than a reference. Freud’s dream-work offers a precise analogue: the dream is assembled from fragments – visual residues, bodily intensities, mnemonic debris – then reorganised through condensation and displacement into a surface that both reveals and masks its logic. R.2 reads like an enactment of this mechanism. Mythic elements do not return as complete scenes but as recomposed pressures: a gesture, a contour, a heraldic trace, an erotic charge. The classical archive is treated as dream material – available for recombination, capable of producing new symbolic economies under contemporary conditions.

A Lacanian frame sharpens the series’ stakes: the work is not only about what the viewer sees, but about what the image does to the viewer’s desire to see. Meaning remains slightly out of reach, and this “almost” is crucial. The image holds the gaze in suspension, not through obscurity but through controlled overdetermination – too many possible alignments, too many plausible readings. The result is an aesthetic of delay, a refusal of interpretive closure that mirrors the structure of desire itself. In R.2, the mythic does not return as belief; it returns as a pattern of compulsion. Jung’s language of archetype provides a parallel account of why these fragments remain potent. The gods persist because they are not merely characters; they are enduring psychic forms – configurations of power, sacrifice, transgression, seduction, violence, protection, metamorphosis. R.2 intensifies this archetypal function by dissolving the stability of the figure. What survives is not the identity of a deity but the persistence of its structure: a recurring grammar of the sacred and the erotic, the ritual and the forbidden. The works therefore occupy a distinct contemporary position: they are neither nostalgic classicism nor simple quotation, but an investigation into why antiquity continues to “speak” through the unconscious.

Formally, R.2 also radicalises the series’ central proposition: fragmentation is not destruction but a generative force. Decomposition becomes a method of reanimation. The image is no longer a site where the classical body is recovered; it is where the classical body is re-coded – submitted to contemporary perception, to digital exactitudes and digital failures, to the logic of repetition and the logic of drift. The resulting surfaces resemble relics and simulations at once: archaeological in their source-material, oneiric in their behaviour. They feel like artefacts from a culture that remembers the gods without worshipping them – where divinity persists as a haunted syntax.

FRAGMENTA DEORUM R.2 is thus best read as the series’ “second dream”: a return of the same pantheon under different psychic weather. It proposes that myth is not a stable inheritance but a dynamic mechanism – one that can be fractured, multiplied, and reassembled into new constellations of meaning. What the works ultimately offer is not illustration, but a threshold: a controlled space where antiquity becomes contemporary again, not by being explained, but by being made unstable – available to interpretation, and therefore alive.

Corpus mythicum iterum disiungitur.

(the mythic body is disassembled once more)

“CASSIOPEIA R.2 (A Deconstruction of the Mythic Body)” advances the logic of fragmentation introduced in the first work but pushes it toward a more radical dissolution. Here, the classical tableau is no longer merely recomposed – it is algorithmically destabilized, atomized into an extended lattice of ornamental repetition that echoes both the obsessive symmetries of Byzantine patterning and the recursive logic of contemporary image-processing. The mythic body becomes unlocatable. Cassiopeia, Andromeda, Perseus, the monstrous Cetus, the imploring warriors and contorted nudes: none remain as identifiable protagonists. Instead, their sculptural anatomies are subjected to a systemic decomposition that reveals the underlying structural violence of myth itself. Every limb, shield, drapery fold, and petrified gesture becomes a unit in a larger visual equation, repeated until meaning fractures into pure ornament. In this expanded matrix, the heroic relief mutates into something closer to a field of psychoanalytic projection. The eye searches for narrative anchors-faces, conflicts, arcs of salvation or punishment – but finds only echoes, distorted beyond recognition. Cassiopeia’s celestial inversion becomes a metaphor for image inversion: a myth turned inside out, rearticulated as pattern rather than story. Where the first work still retains traces of sculptural depth, R.2 introduces a near-cartographic flatness. The mythic landscape is stretched, mirrored, extended – a marble tapestry that anticipates its own digital afterlife. The decomposition is not destructive but methodological. It reveals the mythic body as a cultural construct: iterable, editable, endlessly rewriteable. In this sense, the work enters into dialogue with the 20th and 21st-century artistic interrogations of the classical canon – from deconstructive postmodern sculpture to conceptual photography that challenges the authority of historical form. What emerges is not the collapse of antiquity but its reconfiguration. Myth survives here not as narrative fidelity, but as aesthetic residue, carried into the contemporary through repetition, distortion, and formal excess. “Cassiopeia R.2” is less a depiction than an exposure. It reveals the architecture of mythology: ornamental, violent, erotic, and profoundly unstable. A mythic body taken apart so that its mechanisms – cultural, psychological, and visual – can finally be seen.

Ubi ordo deficit, ibi anima loquitur.

(where order fails, the soul begins to speak – fragmentum apocryphum)

If MEDEIA (Fragmenta Arcadiae) stages the myth as a fractured tableau, MEDEIA R.2 (Disturbed v.1.7) intensifies the fracture into a systemic collapse. The image operates as a destabilized double, a distorted echo in which Medeia’s mythic structure is subjected to visual entropy. Relief figures dissolve into a matrix of micro-contrasts, Mach-band effects, and pareidolic illusions, generating a surface that seems to shift beneath the eye, as if the marble itself were undergoing psychic convulsion. This is not the narrative of Medeia; this is the afterimage of her presence, dispersed across an over-articulated grid. Here, myth is submitted to the logic of the unconscious: repetition, distortion, condensation. The heroic bodies of Jason, the Argonauts, and their sculptural companions become freudian fragments, involuntary carriers of repressed mythologies that erupt through folds, ruptures, and doubled contours. Where the first work examines the architecture of myth, this one interrogates its destabilization. The surface is a field of visual instability – dreamlike, recursive, and at times violently incoherent. Medeia appears as a force rather than a figure: a catalyst that undoes proportionality, order, and the heroic ideal. Her myth becomes a study in psychic disturbance, a choreography of dissolution in which identity and narrative collapse into a shimmering field of possibilities. “Disturbed” does not signify damage but transformation. This work proposes a radical epistemology of myth, wherein meaning emerges only through disorientation. The sculptural archive becomes a contemporary organism: mutable, hallucinatory, forever on the edge of recognition. What we see is the mythic body not retold, but unmade and remade within the logic of the dream.

ἓν σῶμα, διχὰ ψυχή.

(one body, a split soul – fragmentum hellenicum)

DEA GEMINA R.2 (Fragmenta Bifrons) shifts the question of doubleness from the realm of structure to the realm of atmosphere. Here the classical sources are still present – carved bodies, draperies, weapons, gestures – but they are subjected to a process of layering and soft erasure that moves them closer to the logic of dreams than to that of historical relief. The image behaves like a surface on which memory and oblivion are in constant negotiation, where no figure fully stabilizes and no fragment entirely disappears. The title again invokes a “twin goddess” but the emphasis falls less on mythology than on psychic experience. In Jungian terms, the work seems to visualize an encounter with the shadow and the anima at once: a confrontation with what is both intimately one’s own and radically other. Freudian dream-work is inscribed in the way elements condense and dissolve, creating a texture of allusions without clear origin. Lacan’s notion of the divided subject – a self that never coincides with itself – finds here a visual equivalent: an image in which every attempt at recognition is accompanied by a slight displacement, a sense that something remains out of frame. Rather than offering a legible scene from Greek or Roman mythology, DEA GEMINA R.2 (Fragmenta Bifrons) operates as an oneiric residue of that world. The erotic and the violent, the heroic and the sacrificial, the human and the divine coexist in a suspended state, as if the marble of antiquity had been left to dream its own history. The work invites the viewer into this intermediate zone, where interpretation is unavoidable but never definitive. Figures seem to promise a narrative, only to fold back into a more abstract play of repetition and rhythm. As part of Crișan’s ongoing exploration of Fragmenta Deorum, DEA GEMINA R.2 (Fragmenta Bifrons) can be understood as a contemporary meditation on how myths survive when their doctrinal frameworks have faded. What remains are not clear stories, but intensities: patterns, echoes, atmospheres. The piece offers a refined, psychologically charged image for those interested in the intersections of myth, psychoanalysis and contemporary art – not as separate domains, but as overlapping ways in which cultures learn to dream about themselves.

Ὁ πόντος ἐν θραύσμασι μιμεῖται θεούς.

(in its fragments, the sea imitates the gods – fragmentum hellenicum)

If ARGONAUTICA (Tabula Pelagi) offers a chart of the voyage, ARGONAUTICA R.2 (Fragmenta Pelagi) throws the viewer directly into the sea. The grid has dissolved into a continuous, turbulent surface where the fragments of classical sculpture surge and recede like waves. Figures, prows, horses, shields, and torsos collide in a dense, almost pelagic tissue. The Argonaut myth is no longer mapped from above; it is experienced from within, as a field of forces without stable horizon. Here, fragmentation no longer reads as methodical; it becomes visceral. The repetitive vertical striations evoke both the fluting of columns and the verticality of rain or spray, as if the relief had been submerged and then re-emerged, eroded and recomposed. Bodies appear only to be swallowed again by the surrounding mass. The eye searches for Jason, for the Fleece, for a clear axis of action, but instead encounters eddies of recognition – faces that half-form, gestures that dissipate, contortions that suggest struggle, shipwreck, or ecstatic combat. The work amplifies the psychoanalytic dimension of Fragmenta Deorum. The sea, in Freud’s vocabulary, is a recurrent metaphor for the unconscious: depth, opacity, and latent content. In Fragmenta Pelagi, mythic material behaves precisely in this way – surfacing as partial objects, then slipping back into abstraction. The Argonauts become less a band of heroes and more a series of drives: risk, conquest, loss, repetition. The “voyage” is internalized as a process of psychic navigation through fragmentary images that never fully resolve. Within the series, ARGONAUTICA R.2 (Fragmenta Pelagi) can be read as the submerged counterpart to Tabula Pelagi. Where the first work maintains a vestige of order through the grid, this one relinquishes that scaffolding. What remains is the raw pelagic condition of myth: swirling, saturated, excessive. The sea itself becomes the archive of the Argonauts – a memory that no longer preserves their forms intact, but continues to move them, break them, and recombine them in perpetuity.

Τα τραύματα οὐ κοιμῶνται.

(the wounds do not sleep – fragmentum oneiricum)

ILIAS R.2 (Fragmenta Heroica) approaches the Trojan War from the other side of narration – from the perspective of what remains when the story has been told too many times. The image presents a vertical, softly diffused field of recomposed marble, where the boundaries between bodies, weapons and draperies have begun to dissolve. The epic persists, but as afterimage: a pale, insistent shimmer of forms that will not fully withdraw. Here the heroic is no longer triumphant; it is spectral. The bright tonality, close to overexposure in places, suggests both the erosion of stone and the bleaching effect of recall. Instead of the clarity of action, we encounter a kind of visual fatigue: the surface of a psyche that has carried the war for too long. Freud’s notion that unworked-through trauma returns in dreams is translated into a visual register: nothing is sharply defined, yet everything is insistently present. The work feels less like a depiction of battle than like the lingering atmosphere of having witnessed it. From a Jungian angle, ILIAS R.2 (Fragmenta Heroica) touches the archetype of the “wounded collective”. The figures are no longer individual heroes with names; they are gestures of struggle, support, collapse and ascent, repeated and mirrored until they become patterns rather than persons. The gods are not overtly shown, yet their absence is active. The divine appears as tension in the composition, as a surplus of energy that cannot be assigned to any single form. The myth has shifted from narrative to structure, from story to a kind of shared, unconscious geometry. The work also reflects on the way classical imagery has been endlessly reproduced, idealized and consumed within art history. By softening contours and allowing motifs to bleed into each other, Alexandru Crișan stages a quiet resistance to the fetish of the pristine statue. The marble here seems to be in motion – not animated by a god, but unsettled by time, interpretation and desire. Lacan’s insight that the gaze is never neutral is relevant: the more we look, the more the surface responds, offering new alignments, new possible readings, without ever stabilizing. As part of Fragmenta Deorum, this piece embodies the series’ oneiric core. It is less a scene than a condition: the condition of living with inherited images of glory and devastation that no longer quite fit, yet continue to shape our inner landscapes. ILIAS R.2 (Fragmenta Heroica) invites the viewer into that ambiguous zone, where myth has faded just enough to reveal the workings of memory, projection and loss beneath it.

Non equus, non murus: sed memoria fallax. Ilion in fragmentis loquitur. Interpretatio est iter; somnus, lex.

(not the horse, not the wall: but unreliable memory. ilion speaks in fragments. interpretation is a journey; sleep, the law.)

ILION R.2 (Fragmenta Dolii) approaches the same epic matter from a different psychic temperature: less “tabula” than residue, less index than afterimage. If dolus names the Trojan stratagem as cultural logic, fragmenta names its mode of survival – what remains when story fractures into sensation and myth collapses into mnemonic debris. In FRAGMENTA DEORUM, Crișan repeatedly insists that antiquity does not return as stable iconography; it returns as a disturbed field of signals. Here, Ilion is not revisited as a place, but as a pressure within the dream – an atmosphere of heroism and loss that cannot be contained by narrative closure. Without the explicit regulatory presence of the grid, the work reads as a drift of fragments held together by symmetry and repetition rather than by cataloguing. This is important conceptually: the epic is no longer presented as something we can “map”, but as something that acts on us – like a remembered scene that we cannot fully reconstruct, yet cannot forget. Freud’s notion of repetition compulsion becomes a useful frame: what returns is not the event in its historical sequence, but a patterned insistence, an affective loop. The myth persists as recurrence. Lacan would locate this persistence in the circuitry of desire: the epic becomes a theatre where the subject encounters the lure of the image – its promise of wholeness – and simultaneously the impossibility of completing it. The work refuses final synthesis; it maintains the viewer inside the labour of looking. Jung’s language of archetypes clarifies why Ilion continues to haunt: it is a reservoir of the Hero and the Shadow, of sacrificial economies and transgressive intelligence, of sacred violence and erotic proximity. Yet ILION R.2 does not “represent” these archetypes; it renders the conditions under which archetypes appear – through condensation, through mirroring, through the kind of perceptual ambiguity that produces pareidolia. Meaning is not delivered as iconographic certainty; it is generated as a phenomenology of interpretation. The viewer’s mind completes the work, not by solving it, but by moving through it. Eco’s semiotics provides a precise vocabulary for this experience. The work activates an encyclopaedia – our accumulated cultural knowledge of epic, statuary, museum space, and the visual language of authority – yet it continually interrupts any claim to definitive reading. It is open, but not random; it is plural, but not empty. The “deceit” in dolus becomes an ethics of viewing: the work teaches that images do not only show, they persuade; they do not only signify, they seduce; and they do so through structures that exceed conscious intention. In this sense, Ilion is not simply Troy; Ilion is the condition in which culture organizes itself around signs that endure precisely because they remain interpretable. As contemporary art, ILION R.2 operates as a critique and reanimation of the classical archive. It treats antiquity not as a monument to be admired from distance, but as material to be metabolized – broken, recomposed, and returned to circulation under new epistemic conditions. Crișan’s practice, grounded in architectural thinking and photographic precision, produces an image that behaves like a relic and a diagram at once: a relic because it carries the aura of a canonical past; a diagram because it exposes the mechanics by which that past continues to structure present imagination. The result is not nostalgia, but a contemporary oneiric apparatus: a work that stages Ilion as a dream of culture itself – beautiful, unstable, and persistently unfinished.

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