Q#5 – QUIRITATIO
> about Q5: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.” It was the novelty and the sterility of a mid-Quarantine. It was, indeed, Dickensian in its unravelling, reeking of imaginary, unsavory characters and cautionary tales… ‘twas a true “tale of two cities”: one outside my window, vacant, pointless, yet alluring like never before; the other one, a jailbird inside my head, since my abode seemed breached by a myriad of emotions running amok. Between those two incongruous threads of reality– the impetuousness of a quiritatio, a cry for help that seemed marooned between TV sound bites and online angst, between térébenthine fetor and home-cooked meals eroticism. It all converged towards the acrylic exorcism that, upon your gaze, may break down the fourth wall of pandemic rigmarole.
> Q project: “Qualis artifex pereo…” If ever there is a germane moment in an artist’s life to take Nero, the fifth Emperor of Rome, seriously, and, consequently, to try to correctly translate his words, it is precisely during a pandemic! These are works created between December 2019 and August 2021. They are the offspring of a “cordon sanitaire” that challenged my cloistered creative impulses to the brink of burnout. On the sunny side of the process, my decade-long interest in a multifaceted abstract expressionism was nurtured by the “cordon solitaire” that the COVID-19 “Q”uarantine imposed upon me. I think that, for any artist, obsession is coherence, even more so when his senses are under siege. My own coherence was driven by a documentarian impulse coupled with an identity reconstruction: you are “reading”, in fact, selected pages from an “acrylic journal”, warts and all… Incidentally, I’ve always thought that reading between the lines, no matter how blurred their askew edges, is the key to immersive empathic analogies – especially when it comes to lyrical abstractions that connect egos and souls.
> artifex: I am a visual storyteller who dissects perceptions and deconstructs mythologies. The fact is, I have put crayon, charcoal or brush to paper or canvas for as long as I can remember, always obsessed with geometries and color resonance, subsequently fascinated by the transpositions I was imposing upon them by toying with the light switch in my room. When I was about 12 years old, I have received my very first photo camera. It was a Zenit E, which I have took apart within hours and, of course, failed to put back together for weeks on end – a borderline fatalistic compulsion, very similar to the noxious process that breeds the chromatic “alchemy” of my paintings. What followed were the years when natural light became my “governess”. A decade after that, as a professional architect, the logic of the obsession turned out to be the taming of both artificial and natural light between blocks of concrete and sheets of glass. The sum of those successive inception points and ensuing pathways, together with over 15 years of fine-art photography experimentations, pushed me towards the artistic anxieties the “chromatic exorcism” of which you are seeing now.
> more: “Q” > https://alexandru-crisan.com/projects/q/
> Unique Artwork, painting
> dimensions 70 x 52cm (77 x 57cm), signed on bottom right, original
> “Q#5 – Quiritatio” is available for purchase as an Unique Artwork. The original painting is made with acrylic on handmade paper 640gsm. The artwork presents one protective layer of satin varnish. The artwork is signed by the artist on front 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.