Alexandru Crișan is a visual artist interested in the existential complementarity of objective and nonobjective forms of expression. As far as the latter is to be unpacked, his “counter-professional” career in photography began in 2008; his paintings stand, for almost three decades, as the most intimate, borderline atavistic, acts of divulgence. Assuming that taxonomy is of any consequence, he is partial to fine-art photography and Abstract Expressionism.
The eclectic nature of his projects is, therefore, a given.
When it comes to the acrylic heart-chambers of his work, there is an uncanny sentiment of intimacy that gradually found its safe house within the lyrical abstractions spectrum. In the aftermath of incipient spiritualist art etudes, transcending a surrealist period of emancipation from the confines of geometry, not to mention a stint in the magical realism of overpainted photographic negatives, an obsessive chase for the “taming of the light within the organic pool of colors” ensued. While this pursuit found its default creative outlet within architecture, it also pushed him towards the logic of abstract expressionism. A decade after he found his eclectic (often nonrepresentational) niche, the most spectacular results were the series “The Human Comedy” (acrylic Balzacian musings on intersectional dead ends), “Discorsi” (color-coded existentialist Q&As), and “Q” (a chromatic synthesis triggered by anxieties and saudade). His works evolved into a symbiosis which he calls “Brutalisme lyrique”. He describes this artistic approach as “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 metabolicpraxeology is delivering the visceral coherence. To put it differently, I now act as a painter (abstract, perhaps) and I final-cut as an architect (deconstructivist, probably).” The
“Entropy” series is the pinnacle of this process.
His photography is a direct result of compulsive visual disquisitions on impromptu portraiture, architectural equivocations, parametric manipulations, “hybrid storytelling” andevocative conservationism. Most of his long-term, open-ended photographic series – such as “Minimal White / Minimal Black”, or “Lost Highway / My Car is Your Avatar” – are meditations on loci and human perceptions. The research on and within photography gradually afforded him a surreal vision of immateriality, which he debonairly likes to describe as “tormenting several stages of a hyperrealist mise en abyme”. Since 2015, he developed quite a few “meta-projects”: “Erotoarchitecture”, “Metropoesis”, “Hortus Conclusus”, “Alex Transcends the Balkans for a Bottle of Perfume”, “Mechaniarchy” and “Shoah”, under the compelling awareness and besetting exploration of otherness and of self.
Crișan’s works have been presented in over a dozen international exhibitions, have been
published in over 40 peer-reviewed magazines, have received over 400 international awards
and nominations, and are part of several privately owned collections and art galleries.