ENTROPY II (T/ime’s A/rrow, the O/nomatopoeia)
> about: Entropy is an eschatological murmuration. Surrendering to its cooling protectorate (and its dull, dire dare) will force an artist to either freeze or flock amok (since artists and groupishness don’t mix very well). This is a diptych about the Second Law of Thermodynamics and (objective) tinnitus.
Appendix
In any portrait, chromatic nutrients are sapped (more or less involuntarily) by the understanding of the fact that any (untainted) natural process has a (dubious, but unescapable) destination, and that back-tracking is a (labyrinthine) illusion. Deciding on the size of your canvases becomes (counterintuitively) trivial, considering that the (rather) inevitable transfer and transformation of energy will only lead to more and more (and more and more) (of its) waste. These are the Physics–rooted reasons why I’ve started this painting (and, in fact, the entire “Entropy” series) with an en Brunaille intent. But the deluge of potential nuances overwhelmed the coherence of my work, so stratification (and sublimation) became paramount. As an architect, I feel at ease tinkering with Sgraffito “frequency responses”. I wanted to propagate them into the acrylic. Only a Brutalist resolve stopped me from overwhelming you with ornamental clues that would have artificially increased the musicality of this work. But I wanted this painting to reverberate like Arvo Part’s Kanon Pokajanen, not like Bach’s Goldberg Variations. Just as I wanted it to smell like adulterated metropolitan snow, and not like a pastoral summer rain. If my chromatic impulsiveness was nurtured by Caravaggio (Polidoro da, to be precise), it came to terms with itself once (K) Malevich lowered my heartbeat. And trapped inside this trek, there is a (achromatic and ominous) susurration. One can hear it in Rome, outside the Palazzo Massimo Istoriato, just as loudly as one can hear it while crashing White on White. I hear it in this work, too. I think it holds an aviary panache that describes one’s (orderly) aging migration, which, in turn, puts a swooshing spin on one’s solipsism. In short, otology trumps ontology. However (once you’ve open your eyes again), parenthesis trapped the only truths that mattered, for they were as fungible as stained-glass shards, and the artist – their jailor, who craved the catharsis of a “Brutalisme lyrique” – neglected to set them free, too.
> artistic approach: 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 showing for your view are reflecting touchstones of my detailed approach.
> more on project page: ENTROPY > https://alexandru-crisan.com/projects/entropy/
> Unique Artwork, painting
> dimensions 104 x 72cm / (76 x 56cm) x 2, unframed diptych, signed on top right, original
> “Entropy II (T/ime’s A/rrow, the O/nomatopoeia)” is available for purchase as an Unique Artwork. The original painting is made with acrylic on magnani paper 300gsm. The artwork presents a protective layer of satin varnish. The artwork is signed by the artist on top right side with black ink. The work is also signed, stamped and have a unique identification numbered on the back side. Additionally, we can provide a dedicated Certificate of Authenticity, signed by the Artist, indicating that you have purchased an original unique artwork.
