MINOTAURUS R.2 (Fragmenta Labyrinthi)

> about the image:

Filum Ariadnes in somnio soluitur.

(Ariadne’s thread unravels in the dream – fragmentum hellenico-latinum)

If the first Minotaur image proposes a plan, MINOTAURUS R.2 (Fragmenta Labyrinthi) lingers in what happens after the plan has been internalized. The labyrinth is no longer presented as a clear diagram; it has become a texture, a moving atmosphere of marble and memory. Instead of a “tabula” to be read, we encounter a surface that behaves like the residue of a dream – dense, repetitive, coherent only in the way that dreams are coherent: through mood, rhythm and the stubborn return of certain forms. In the Cretan myth, the labyrinth is a device for containing the unacceptable hybrid at its center. In psychoanalytic terms, it is an architecture of repression: a structure built to manage what cannot be acknowledged. MINOTAURUS R.2 (Fragmenta Labyrinthi) imagines what remains when that structure is no longer entirely successful. The fragments of the classical world do not stay still. They blur, overlap, migrate vertically like currents. The image feels less like a prison for the Minotaur than like the interior weather of a psyche in which the Minotaur has become indistinguishable from the one who wanders. Freud’s dream-work is inscribed here in the way forms condense and dissolve. Bodies, weapons, draperies and faces do not present themselves as discrete elements but as overlapping states: traces of impact, sacrifice, erotic tension and divine authority that never fully resolve. Lacan’s divided subject – perpetually misaligned with itself – finds an echo in this layered field where recognition is always partial, always shifting one step to the side. One feels the presence of conflict, but not its resolution. For Jung, the bull and the labyrinth belong to a constellation of archetypes around power, sacrifice and confrontation with the shadow. Crișan’s image does not fix those archetypes; it lets them circulate. MINOTAURUS R.2 (Fragmenta Labyrinthi) stages an encounter with the myth not as story but as psychic climate. The sacred and the violent are suspended in a state of diffuse intensity, as if the stones of an ancient relief had started to dream themselves. Within Fragmenta Deorum, this work can be understood as a study of how myths persist when their temples are gone and their rituals forgotten. What survives is not the clear line of Theseus’ narrative, but a field of impressions – an oneiric labyrinth woven from visual afterimages. Crișan offers that field to the viewer as a space of projection, inviting each gaze to become its own Ariadne, tracing and losing its thread in the same movement.

> 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

> “MINOTAURUS R.2 (Fragmenta Labyrinthi)” 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.