3rd Place winner
(GracefulLily)’s Wedding Morning
DESCRIPTION
Inspired by the deuterocanonical addition (Ch.13) of the Book of Daniel and the work of Juan Manuel Blanes (“La Casta Susana”, c1862), I wanted to decontextualize an imaginary stance in which Susanna (meaning “graceful lily” in Hebrew), a Classical symbol of virtue and piety, is depicted completely alone, on day of her wedding, years before the moment that fascinated artists such as Lorenzo Lotto, Van Dyck, Artemisia Gentileschi or Picasso. AUTHOR
Alexandru Crișan (b. Bucharest, Romania 1978) is a visual artist interested in the existential complementarity of objective and nonobjective forms of expression. To resolve the former, he is an architect - “but one doesn’t shoot the breeze when it comes to architecture, one comes with bricks and mortar where the breeze will shoot”, as he tells his students. 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. His photography is a direct result of compulsive visual disquisitions on impromptu portraiture, architectural equivocations, parametric manipulations, “hybrid storytelling” and evocative 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. More details: https://alexandru-crisan.com/