ENTROPY III (thru a self, n/arrow/ly)
> about: Entropy is an eschatological foxhole (where, allegedly, no atheists are to be found…). Mapping out its versatility (and its axal, arid atoms) can trick an artist into either psychosomatic solipsism or holistic amok. This is a diptych about homeostasis and dysthymia (aka, persistent depressive disorder).
Appendix
I’ve started this painting as a reaction to Robert Smithson’s “Enantiomorphic Chambers”. As an architect, my interest in Smithson’s work pinpointed the dialectic nature of his “Nonsites”, and his take on biomorphism – a subject I’ve studied extensively via Frank Lloyd Wright. My problem, nevertheless, was that of equilibrium representation – a subject I’ve started to consider crucial only in my mid 30s: it was the logic of the dynamic essence of balance that, ultimately, is to be found at the core of any sense of identification/identity. This kinetic metanarrative offered me the academic tools to explain both the fungible nature of Smithson’s working mediums, and Wright’s neoplastic condemnation of urban developments. It also contradicted, to a certain extent, my sense of purposeless despair (and the obsessive guilt derived from any linear cosmology that may be associated with the idea of entropy). Furthermore, it put a stochastic spin on my artistic work, thus doubling-down on my recurrent sarcasm triggered by the incontinent misnomer “generative art”... However, what is of outmost importance, it allowed the hope of a meta-self-regulatory process that would maintain a relatively stable internal functionality, in spite of evolutionary dead-ends. It afforded me the ontological homeostasis that I’ve previously doubted. Imperfect POVs prove irrelevant when one tries to isolate the chromatic reverberation that discriminates random dynamics from chaotic alliterations. In short, I was trying to capture the irregularities of time, for a very egotistic reason: they affect me the most!
To summarize, completing this soi-disant “Brutalisme lyrique” acrylic fortification helped me escape my own anxiety-carved fosses, and made mirrors meaningless. And it also echoes Hilma af Klint: “Less selfishness, more indifference”.
> 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 107 x 72.5cm / (77 x 57cm) x 2, unframed diptych, signed on top right, original
> “Entropy III (thru a self, n/arrow/ly)” is available for purchase as an Unique Artwork. The original painting is made with acrylic on khadi paper 640gsm. The artwork presents a protective layer of satin-gloss 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.
