ENTROPY VII (Raised by the Wolves I’m Vivisecting)
> about: Entropy is an eschatological dog whistle. Understanding its immanence (and its cranky, cruel call) can push an artist to either play dead or run amok. This polyptych is my kneejerk reaction to it, echoed in heavy rotation for almost four years.
Appendix
The thing is, all such ontological vivisections are exclusively performed on personal pronouns. They require scalpels: Talmudic, Aristotelian, Spinozist, Freudian, Biblical… In my case, the only anesthetic allowed is terebinthine. Surgical textbooks are so heavily codified (and priced!) that one needs to settle for blueprints: from the fingermarks cathartically integrated into the mondmilch of the Pech-Merle cave ceilings, to the Outrenoir metonymically masticated by Pierre Soulages. And, at the end of the day(s), after you have opened your residual self like a book (one that was heavily edited by your genitors – the very one you’re planning to use as a hand-me-down peace offering to your offspring), the only Dantesque hope you can muster is that some sort of postmortem polychromatic transubstantiation will ensue. Of course, such maladaptive narcissism, which borderlines idolatry, is at the very core of the impulse to misinterpret the Socratic dictum “The unexamined life is not worth living“. However, just as Brutalist monumentalities seem to require only banal gravitational pull to irk the drizzle of time, and just as Abstraction Lyrique selfies seem to rely solipsistically on the centrifugal decomposition of randomly-clustered photons, so too the amour-de-soi needs nothing but a heartbeat. Alas, sophistication and consequential sophistry are pure BS when it comes the unidirectional flow of survival (and, consequently, of grief), hence the title of this work.
> 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 212 x 72cm / (77 x 57cm) x 4, unframed quadriptych, signed on bottom right, original
> “Entropy VII (Raised by the Wolves I’m Vivisecting)” 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 bottom 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.
