ARGONAUTICA R.2 (Fragmenta Pelagi)

> about the image:

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.

> 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

> “ARGONAUTICA R.2 (Fragmenta Pelagi)” 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.