In my mind – therefore in my hands – when Brâncuși was shaping The First Cry (1917), he was absorbed by heartbeats, as Beethoven’s 9th was playing in the background, mystifying the background, possibly backwards, possibly on a skipping disc, possibly only the first three minutes of it. Beginnings are rarely self-explanatory; they crave context, they crave hindsight, which is to say they crave form. In my mind – therefore in my hands – there was a fear of darkness which was lending expediency to Brâncuși’s fingers. Around 1908, that fear was already emerging from the conformist, rather romanticized rendition of nutritional rest, in which one can almost see a rapid cellular division towards an unsettling puberty: the Head of a Sleeping Child has always disquieted me a little bit, with its Classical mechanistic attempt at divination, with its regrets played in reverse. I remember reading somewhere that during that period, after setting up his studio @ (sic! – I often think of Paris as the artist’s host server!) 54 rue du Montparnasse, Brâncuși felt increasingly disappointed with his previous work, referring to it as “beef-stake”, as plagued by fleshly mimicry.

By 1924, however, I think that fear had been completely exorcised, hence The Beginning of the World; there is a resolute vibration emerging from the ovoid, affording an Apollonian quality to that work; I, for one, recognize in that vibration a solar virtue that makes me (dramatically) envious: Brâncuși had geometricized an ascending order of photons, taming and, if the light is true, muffling out whichever cut of darkness one discovers in one’s self as age, well, happens.

Now, please take another look at my Overture, while standing approximately 10 feet (3 meters) away from it! From my mind – therefore from my hands – I hope the architecture of a promise is surfacing. * (appendix / from a dialogue on works between C.S.D. and A.C. for AI = VR * t² / ROOTS Exhibition 2025)

Artist statement:

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.

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. 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. When it comes to the acrylic heart-chambers of his work, there is an uncanny sentiment of intimacy that gradually found its safe house within the lyrical abstractions spectrum. In the aftermath of incipient spiritualist art etudes, transcending a surrealist period of emancipation from the confines of geometry, not to mention a stint in the magical realism of overpainted photographic negatives, an obsessive chase for the “taming of the light within the organic pool of colors” ensued. While this pursuit found its default creative outlet within architecture, it also pushed him towards the logic of abstract expressionism. A decade after he found his eclectic (often nonrepresentational) niche, the most spectacular results were the series “The Human Comedy” (acrylic Balzacian musings on intersectional dead ends), “Discorsi” (color-coded existentialist Q&As), and “Q” (a chromatic synthesis triggered by anxieties and saudade). His works evolved into a symbiosis which he calls “Brutalisme lyrique”. He describes this artistic approach as “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 put it differently, I now act as a painter (abstract, perhaps) and I final-cut as an architect (deconstructivist, probably).” The “Entropy” series is the pinnacle of this process. Alexandru Crișan’s works have been presented in over a dozen international exhibitions, have been published in several peer-reviewed magazines, have received several international awards and nominations, and are part of several privately owned collections and art galleries.

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