What seems to unite the two artists in their transmedial practices is the use of the human figure as a process of constant negotiation between the symptoms of cultural memory, identity construction, and the anachronic potential of the image. Far from functioning as representations of a fixed subject, the labor of the figure causes spatio-temporal markers to disintegrate, characters to blend, oscillating between the recognizable and the disfigured, generating forms characterized by an unstable morphology and a permanent state of becoming.

The work becomes a witness to its own time, an inalienable trace of history, in the form of a relic that reappears after a period of discontinuity. The image is understood as a rupture (“déchirure”) in the field of the visible, an indeterminate site that carries within it a shared cultural stratum: European cultural heritage, reactivated classical mythology, and self-creation as real-time presentation. In this context, the relic follows an anagogical rather than a traditional sense — material evidence of the tensions between what has been and what continues to survive, between uncertainty and anticipation.

The assemblage forces together personal histories, cultural heritage, digital imaginaries, and vestiges that coexist. Close to what Georges Didi-Huberman described as “collocatio” — the place where objects from different temporalities can exist without losing their differentiating characteristics, empowering a play of impossible spaces. The hybrid bodies that carry the fragmentation and transformation of this process do not merely express an aesthetic option directed toward the grotesque, but accept it in the form of dissonant figures that essentialize its anachronic characteristics. They take on caricatural, moralizing, socially critical attitudes, contradictions toward the past, reinterpreting it in an entirely singular way.

Alexandra Mîță’s body of sculptural work develops a universe populated by hybrid creatures oscillating between the human, the animal, and the divine. The labor of the figure traverses the entire field of figuration, prefiguration, and disfiguration. Her anthropomorphized creatures involve different temporalities as relations of association between the present, a past of mythical creatures and of the theological universe, and the future they prefigure. The image disturbs the order of representation and dynamizes it by converting the sculptures into devices of suspension, of waiting — and, through this, of desire. Heterochronism allows for the construction of an identity that is not stable but in a process of transformation: figures that betray themselves, disappear and are reborn, constantly inventing new forms of their own self. Starting from casts of her own body, which she rehydrates, coats in wax, and combines with aluminum, bronze, pork flesh, or bovine skulls, the artist produces objects that exceed the status of representation. Through the traces left by the body, the sculptures become contemporary relics that preserve the direct contact between subject and object.

Nicolae Romanițan’s paintings are systematized through a methodical anarchy of iconography and temporalities. Montage and fragmentation transform cultural memory, material support, and technological nostalgia into visual forms that render time visible in its contradictory complexity. The image becomes symptom through visual formulas that refuse to disappear and that continually interrupt, at unexpected moments. Thus, in his series of paintings, a constellation of survivals emerges, existing within an extended present: medieval, Byzantine, or Flemish particularities, early digital interfaces, video games of the ’90s and 2000s, medieval figures and fantastical creatures. The figure is part of a broader matrix, appearing in the form of caricature, écorché, video game character, or iconic sign. The narratives of fragmentation render the prefigured character of slow apocalyptic landscapes, without a definitive end, suspended between catastrophe and possibility. Situated within a residual utopia, the ruin shifts from a sign of disappearance toward a site of unconsumed potential.

Rather than offering answers, these works remain in aporia. They explore how something can survive transformation without ceasing to be itself, and how the past can become tangible again in the present. In the face of futures often perceived as inevitable or even fatalistic, the figure-relic, the figure-ruin, and the figure-symptom remain fragile forms of resistance: traces of vanished worlds and, simultaneously, promises of worlds still possible.