This work is part of a series that mixes ideological narratives with Expressionist contours. When I say ideology, I refer exclusively to its original meaning, as Antoine Destutt de Tracy defined it, in 1796, as a “science of ideas”. When I say Expressionist, I underscore emotional overreactions, I underline a nurturing Modernist sentiment of angst, and I chip away at the reactionary panache of any Realist praxeology. Finally, I nuance these contours with a convoluted impulse to hyper-inflate Abstraction, with acrylic spices such as an Outrenoir (apud Pierre Soulages) inquiry, some palette-knife(d) cacophonies (à la Jean-Paul Riopelle), or a handful of non-cognitive kinetic alliterations (via Georges Mathieu).

Being an artist, I twist reality to make a point. So, sometimes, I feel like a poet – which is a pedantic way of admitting that you should not necessarily trust me, as several long lines of canonical wisdom, from Plato (“The Republic”, Books II, III and X) to the Quran (Surah 26 Ash-Shu’ara, Ayat 221-227), have emphasized with gusto. But being an artist means that I am, sometimes, in the mood to become a trigger. This particular work is about the Berliner Mauer. It’s about Brexit. It’s an open invitation for the viewers to trespass their borders (or “backstops”) of choice, to bisect their own biases, and to bookmark Balzac in their browsers.

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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