Honorable Mention
Matryoshka (the 4th wave) redux. The Eye(S) Of the Skin
DESCRIPTION
Matryoshka (the 4th wave) redux.The Eye(S) Of the Skin
We all know those endearing traditional Russian dolls. They encapsulate (pun intended!) the foundational values of motherhood and family. But what would a Matryoshka doll look like if it were to reveal the mise en abyme poker faces a woman needs to put on after having an abortion denied to her?
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/