TETRAD OF DESIRE (Quattuor Figurae)

> about the image:

Quattuor formae unum desiderium portant.

(four forms carry a single desire – fragmentum apocryphum)

TETRAD OF DESIRE (Quattuor Figurae) reconstructs the erotic imaginary of the Greco-Roman world through a method of systematic fragmentation and reassembly. The work begins with classical reliefs depicting mythic conflict, seduction, and ritual gesture, but decomposes them into a lattice of repeated units – an architecture of desire built from the ruins of antiquity. What emerges is neither a narrative scene nor a recognizable myth, but a four-fold apparition: a feminine quaternity suspended between symmetry and disorder. This tetradic configuration expands the tradition of Janus beyond duality into a speculative female counterpart: a structure not of passage, but of multiplication. Four bodies, four gestures, four echoes of touch. Their erotic charge is not ornamental, but structural. In Roman and Hellenistic contexts, the erotic was never merely private; it functioned as a cultural engine, a mode of knowledge, a ritual technology. Here, eroticism becomes epistemic. The touch of one figure becomes the memory of another. Identity dissolves into repetition, and repetition becomes a kind of invocation. The grid does not stabilize the image. It unsettles it. Each square becomes a micro-relief, a self-contained interval where gesture loses its origin. What appears at first as ornament is, in fact, a deconstruction of the mythic body – an undoing of the unity that classical sculpture presupposes. The figures are no longer subjects; they are vectors, conduits of desire refracted through the logic of symmetry. Their eroticism is recursive, folding back on itself until it becomes pattern rather than scene, structure rather than story. TETRAD OF DESIRE is not a return to antiquity. It is an excavation of its unconscious. The work proposes that myth survives not in its narratives, but in its compulsions: the repetition of forms, the persistence of gestures, the erotic as a site of knowledge. What remains is a quaternity without origin – a ritualized geometry of desire carved from the debris of classical memory.

> series statement:

FRAGMENTA DEORUM reexamines classical mythology through a contemporary process of visual decomposition and reassembly. In this series, Alexandru Crișan approaches the divine body not as a fixed icon but as a mutable structure – an image that can be dismantled, reorganized, and reanimated through the logic of the fragment. Trained as an architect, Crișan adopts an analytical method in which sculpture becomes material, symmetry becomes strategy, and the image behaves like a spatial system rather than a narrative scene. Each work operates within a field of controlled instability. Fragments of ancient reliefs, gestures, and anatomical details are multiplied and recomposed into new configurations where recognition and uncertainty coexist. These images provoke pareidolia: faces emerge where none were placed, mythic creatures surface from folds of marble, and bodies appear to oscillate between coherence and dissolution. Meaning does not reside in any single element but in the shifting relations among them. The series engages mythology as a psychological reservoir rather than a storytelling device. Echoes of Greek and Roman deities – Medeia, Hecate, Cassiopeia – are not depicted but inferred, surfacing through repetition, distortion, and dream-like recombination. This oneiric dimension aligns the work with psychoanalytic readings of the image, where memory, desire, and symbolic residue intertwine. The divine re-enters contemporary vision not as a stable figure but as an afterimage: a structure of intimation, erosion, and metamorphosis. FRAGMENTA DEORUM proposes that fragmentation is a generative force. Through decomposition, the sacred is not lost but redistributed; through recomposition, myth becomes newly legible. Each artwork stands as a contemporary relic, a threshold where architecture, mythology, and the unconscious converge. Crișan’s images reveal that the gods persist – not in their intact forms, but in the fragments through which they continue to speak.

> project page: FRAGMENTA DEORUM

> Special Large Collector’s Edition of 10, numbered from 1/10

> Format SL1 90CM, SL2 120cm, SL3 150cm on shortest edge

> “TETRAD OF DESIRE (Quattuor Figurae)” is available for purchase in one unique Art Limited Collector’s Edition of 10 and 2 Artist’s Proofs, in giclee archival art print at the highest museum quality standards, on Fine Art cotton paper from Hahnemuhle with pigment ink. The Collector’s Editions are certified signature editions, stamped and numbered on the back side. Additionally, as a separate document, a dedicated signed Certificate of Authenticity, with artwork title, date and edition number, indicate that you have purchased an original exclusive artwork. No further reproduction of any kind will be run after the collector edition is sold out. The prices for Special Large Collector Editions are progressive. For other detailed information’s see the section ART PRINTS.