ILIAS R.2 (Fragmenta Heroica)

> about the image:

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.

> 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

> “ILIAS R.2 (Fragmenta Heroica)” 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.