T e o d o r a T r o f i m o v
Art History graduate, University of Groningen
Master student in Museology and
Curatorship at the University of Bologna
October, 2026
Palacio de Cristal
Airy, weightless, floating: this is how this author would describe Crihană’s Palacio de Cristal, like a fleeting vision in a dream before it slips away. Perhaps it is the pervasiveness of soothing blues, greens and grays, the fine, detail-defining brushwork gradually dissolving into hazy contours, or the delicate balance between transparency and opacity.
In this dreamscape, two trees are rooted in a body of water that seems to extend beyond the picture plane. Their red foliage, softened by Crihană’s loose brushwork and restrained palette, casts barely perceptible reflections on the water’s surface. Bizarrely, the smaller tree is enclosed in a glass case that appears to float seamlessly upon it. In the background, an elegant domed structure emerges only partially into view; a classical Ionic portico is the building’s sole departure from glass and iron.
Yet the artist’s title- Palacio de Cristal- refers to no metaphorical construct. The structure is Madrid’s Crystal Palace, built in Retiro Park in 1887, modelled on Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace in London and designed by Ricardo Velázquez Bosco for the General Exhibition of the Philippine Islands, then a Spanish colony. The exhibition sought to glorify the Spanish colonial enterprise and restore the image of an empire already in decline.
The palace was conceived as an artificial environment in which to display tropical plants transported from Spain’s distant colonies, their growth carefully regulated through light, humidity and climate. At its base, an artificial lake hosts bald cypresses, a species native to the southeastern United States. Even the landscape surrounding this monument to colonial ambition thus resists any straightforward identification with the territory it was built to represent.
Returning to Crihană’s surrealist detail, the glass case enclosing the smaller tree invites another reading: a living specimen uprooted from its origins, estranged from its habitat and rendered an object of display. The Crystal Palace behind it, too, becomes something more than an elegant architectural marvel: a beautiful enclosure in which nature is curated, contained and exhibited. What, then, separates the glass prison in the foreground from the palace that looms behind it?
Los Mentideros
A large church, perched on top of an elevated, railed platform. Despite the austere impression, the gate is wide open. The uneven terrain of the square is devoid of life or movement, save for two male figures in the foreground. Dressed in the attire of urban gallant gentlemen of 17th-century Spain, the two figures seem engaged in a sensitive conversation, both covering their mouths. In true Crihană manner, the surrealist, eerie touch is a thin, translucent curtain that mysteriously hangs from the top right corner of the composition, partially covering the silhouette of the male figure on the right.
The seventh stop in Crihană’s artistic ‘tour’ of Madrid takes the viewer back in time, at least two centuries, to the now-demolished Convent of San Felipe el Real. The former Madrileño convent of Calced Augustinian monks stood at the beginning of Calle Mayor, just a short distance from Puerta del Sol.
Contrary to the tranquil yet strange atmosphere conjured by the artist in Los Mentideros, the area around the Convent of San Felipe would have been bustling with life and movement in 17th-century Madrid. Beneath the platform supporting the convent was a series of small shops. Commerce and banter, however, were not the only activities animating the place. In curious contrast to the holiness imposed by the proximity of a Catholic place of worship, the beating heart of the place was, in fact, gossip.
The gossip circles of Spain’s capital were fixed enclaves where residents met to talk, gather information and share gossip. The steps of San Felipe were ideal for those with ample leisure time and an ambition to be the first to know about Spain’s imperial expansion, thanks to the proximity of the Royal Post Office. The convent’s steps also offered a generous vantage point over one of Madrid’s main promenades, Calle Mayor, facilitating people-watching, ‘accidentally’ running into acquaintances, friends or family and… debriefing with the chosen gossip partner.
Crihană’s almost transparent curtain ironises the performed secrecy of whatever gossip the two gentlemen might be sharing. Moral of the story: empires and altars may rise and fall, fashions may change, but gossip is… forever?
Telefónica
Florian Doru Crihană’s tour of Madrid continues along Gran Vía, one of the Spanish capital’s main thoroughfares and a landmark of its tourism, commerce, and leisure since the early twentieth century. At number 28, the artist presents, from an elevated oblique viewpoint, one of Spain’s first skyscrapers and an icon of twentieth-century technological progress: the Edificio Telefónica.
Completed in 1929 as the headquarters of Spain’s National Telephone Company, the building housed advanced telephone exchanges that helped automate communications and accommodate a rapidly growing number of subscribers. Designed by Ignacio de Cárdenas Pastor after the model established by Manhattan’s Barclay-Vesey Building, its unprecedented- though soon surpassed- height transformed it into a symbol of progress, connectivity, and Madrid’s emergence as a modern metropolis.
The introduction of mobile telephony in 1976 gradually diminished the building’s functional importance while increasing its historic and symbolic value. Following renovations in the 1990s, part of the skyscraper was dedicated to cultural uses, including a Telecommunications Museum. In May 2026, Telefónica sold the building, which will continue to serve commercial purposes while preserving its architectural and decorative character.
In Telefónica, the only element disrupting the otherwise tranquil atmosphere is a gigantic Heraldo telephone perched atop a building opposite the skyscraper. Introduced in 1961, the model became an icon of everyday modernity and domestic life for many Spaniards. A dialogue emerges between the building that enabled the telephone network and the object through which ordinary people experienced it.
Yet Crihană also infuses the Heraldo with a personal dimension. Reminiscent of the telephone used by his own family in the 1970s, the oversized object transforms a symbol of communication into one of memory and nostalgia. By juxtaposing the monumental headquarters of a telecommunications network with a familiar household device, the artist bridges public history and private experience, reminding viewers of a time when communication required not a tap on a screen, but the deliberate gesture of turning a rotary dial.
Real Hospicio de San Fernando
A lonely tree and a small patch of greenery, fenced away. An empty table. A mother looking down, her hands clasped in what seems to be silent prayer. Beside her, a child hides his face in his hands. Crying. It is a simple yet piercing image of poverty, of lack, of need. The figures seem oblivious to the majestic, eerie apparition behind them: a hazy Baroque vision, a saint carved in stone, an edifice built on hope. A threshold to a gentler world, perhaps—one where no tree is ever lonely.
In his trademark style, combining history, memory, and surrealist reverie, artist Florian Doru Crihană offers a glimpse into the Royal Hospice of San Fernando, widely regarded as a jewel of Madrid’s Baroque architecture. Built between 1721 and 1726 to a design by Pedro de Ribera under the patronage of King Philip V, it served as a permanent refuge for the most vulnerable segments of the city’s population: the poor, the beggars, and the destitute. Yet the institution itself long predates the building. The hospice represented the culmination of nearly two centuries of charitable care for Madrid’s poor, sustained through the combined efforts of the Catholic Church and the Spanish Crown before finding its definitive architectural expression in the monumental structure that still stands today.
The centerpiece of Crihană’s painting, the main façade rises like an altarpiece around the entrance portal, acquiring a dynamic upward movement that culminates in a broken pediment characterized by curves and counter-curves. A spectacle of pilasters, oculi, and rocaille guides the viewer’s eye to the niche occupied by the statue of San Fernando. The hospice took San Fernando as its patron in honor of Ferdinand III of Castile, the medieval monarch whose canonization in 1671, only decades before the construction of the hospice, reinforced his status as an ideal model of Christian kingship and charitable duty for a royal institution dedicated to poor relief.
But why does an institution dedicated to the poor require such an imposing architectural presence? The Hospice of San Fernando belongs to a broader tradition in which hospitals, hospices, orphanages, and charitable foundations were designed not merely as functional spaces, but also as public moral statements. In Baroque Spain, a monumental façade for an institution dedicated to removing destitution from the city streets proclaimed royal and religious authority, demonstrated the piety and legitimacy of its patrons, elevated charity into a sacred and civic virtue, and communicated order, discipline, and salvation to the urban public.
Crihană leaves it to the viewer to decide whether the promise embodied by the portal is fulfilled, remembered, or merely dreamed.
April, 2026
Señal a través de los siglos
Enigmatically titled Señal a través de los siglos (“Signal across the centuries”), the fourth painting in the Madrid series may be the most puzzling yet. Set in an inconspicuous piazza, sparsely populated by shadowy human figures, the composition is dominated by an immense wooden, cross-shaped structure resembling a mast. Slightly tilted, it is anchored to the ground and to the surrounding buildings by a network of ropes. A maroon ball hangs from one of these ropes, while three grey circles suggest alternative positions it might occupy. At the top of this perplexing structure, seemingly defying the laws of physics, the Spanish flag floats.
With this painting, Crihană is taking us to Plaza de la Villa, one of the main centres of medieval Madrid, due to its equidistant location between two of the main entrances to the medieval city: Puerta de la Vega and Puerta Guadalajara. Shown in the painting are two of the three historic edifices that surround the square: the 15th-century House and Tower of the Lujanes (on the left side of the composition) and the 16th-century Casa de Cisneros (on the right).
During the first half of the 19th century, the Tower of the Lujanes, at no more than 20m in height, was the tallest civilian building in Madrid. As such, it became an important communication node, as an optical telegraph station was installed on its roof as part of the Madrid–Aranjuez optical telegraph line.
The optical telegraph was an early long-distance communication system in which messages were transmitted visually from tower to tower using adjustable arms or signal elements mounted on high structures. Each configuration corresponded to a pre-arranged code, allowing authorities to relay brief, structured messages across vast distances. In Crihană’s painting, this now-vanished technology is evoked through the scaffold-like form of the structure, transforming it into a symbolic device that bridges historical systems of communication with contemporary reflection.
March, 2026
Mediodía en la Casa de la Panadería
In typical Crihană style, the third painting of the Madrid series places a surrealist twist on an otherwise tranquil, almost deserted environment, usually dominated by a feat of grand architecture. Mediodía en la Casa de la Panadería sketches the contours of a grand urban piazza where, besides a small cast-iron fence and some greenery, the visual centre of interest is a Baroque, porticoed, three-storey building distinguished by its two moderately elevated clock towers. An enlarged solar clock seems to burst from the building’s roof, while another is chased and played with by a boy — a rare instance of human presence in Crihană’s work.
Located in Plaza Mayor, the building featured in the painting is known as the Casa de la Panadería (Bakery House), its name deriving from the fact that the ground floor historically housed the town’s main bakery. Although the origins of the building date back to 1590, and throughout its long history it served various royal and municipal institutions and survived multiple reconstructions after several fires, the aspect that appears to have captured Crihană’s attention is the presence of the two clocks on the towers.
The left-hand tower, which now houses a regular clock, once held a solar clock, represented in the painting as an imposing surreal presence overlooking the scene. The right-hand tower, however, houses a barometer. Before modern weather forecasts, instruments such as thermometers, barometers, and sundials were displayed on public buildings as tools of education, navigation, and civic pride. Crihană faithfully reproduces the barometer still visible on the façade, but to prevent technical elements from dominating the composition, he playfully transforms it into a child’s toy — turning measurement into play and time into imagination.
Un Stradivarius en el Palacio Real
A grand, royal staircase, a marble lion which, instead of receiving (or intimidating) his guests, looks over its shoulder and… a gigantic cello diagonally slashing the picture plane; its neck ever so elegantly emerging through the left-side window, while its severed body rests, under the marble gaze of the lion, as if the laws of physics had been suspended. A surrealist scene, which seems serenely balanced in its bizarreness.
There is a certain oneiric atmosphere to Un Stradivarius en el Palacio Real that makes me liken it to a dream that did not vanish upon awakening. Something in the misty, by now recognizable palette of Crihană—muted grays and browns, the subtle white strokes contouring the architectural elements, the light blue peeking through the windows, the velvety burgundy curtains, the vault frescoes merely suggested by sparse brushstrokes—all conjure the hazy contours of a dream, contrasting with the vivid depiction of the immense cello which dominates the palatial abode. Such is Crihană’s surrealism: quiet and gracefully balanced in its peculiarity.
The second painting of the artist’s Madrid series takes us into the baroque Grand Staircase of the Royal Palace of Madrid, designed by architect Francesco Sabatini in the mid-eighteenth century under the reign of King Philip V, whereas the surrealist apparition of the cello points to the Stradivarius quartet of instruments in the Palace’s collection, also known as the Stradivarius Palatin. The beautifully crafted and intricately adorned quartet—comprising two violins, a viola, and a cello—was gifted to the Royal Spanish Household, and the court composer Luigi Boccherini composed over one hundred musical pieces especially for it. Through this unexpected apparition, Crihană links the grandeur of the palace with the musical legacy preserved within its walls.
February, 2026
Cuesta de la Vega
With Cuesta de la Vega, Florian Doru Crihana opens his Madrid series on an eerily spiritual note. A palette of colored grays, pale blues, warm ochres, and muted deep greens conjures a space that feels at once tangible and otherworldly. A stone staircase leads downward towards a crypt and upward towards an intricate, gilded altarpiece that seems to be suspended in midair, framed only by shrubs of greenery. To the left of this seemingly weightless structure, two lamps frame a wall niche containing a statue of a saint.
Through these carefully staged architectural elements, the artist subtly invokes the layered history of Madrid and its Almudena Cathedral. The title refers to Cuesta de la Vega, the hill bordering the ravine that once protected the Muslim citadel of Mayrit. Named after the vanished Puerta de la Vega, one of the gates in the Arab wall of the al-mudayna (citadel), the site later became emblematic of the city’s Christian reconquest. The present Almudena Cathedral rises where a medieval mosque once stood, destroyed after Alfonso VI reclaimed Madrid.
The modest niche in the painting recalls the legend of the Virgin of Almudena. According to tradition, a statue of the Virgin Mary was hidden within the city walls before the Muslim conquest and miraculously revealed itself to Alfonso VI after days of prayer, when part of the wall crumbled to expose it. Ever since, she has been venerated as Madrid’s spiritual patroness, her presence woven into the city’s historical and devotional identity. Within the Almudena Cathedral, her richly adorned altar rises in striking contrast to the vast whiteness of the interior—a contrast that finds a poetic counterpart in Crihana’s gilded altarpiece, which appears to hover weightlessly at the top of the staircase, suspended between earth and transcendence.
From Lisbon to Madrid
T e o d o r a T r o f i m o v
Art History graduate, University of Groningen
Master student in Museology and
Curatorship at the University of Bologna
February, 2026
Romanian contemporary artist Florian Doru Crihană is widely known for his painted cityscapes, depicting urban landmarks from his home country—such as Galați and Brăila—to major European destinations including Venice, Potsdam, and Strasbourg, as well as cities beyond the continent, among them New York. The start of the new year marks the unveiling of his 21st thematic series, this time dedicated to Madrid, the capital of Spain.
The Madrid project follows closely on the completion of Crihană’s Lisbon series, finalized toward the end of 2025 and comprising 40 works focused on the Portuguese capital. For the artist, the number is deliberate: forty pieces represent, in his view, the minimum required to fully capture a city’s essence. Each new series begins with an in-depth exploration of the historic core of the chosen city, with particular attention given to its cathedral, often treated as both architectural anchor and symbolic point of departure.
In Madrid, this approach is reflected in the opening work of the series, Cuesta de la Vega, which takes inspiration from the Almudena Cathedral. The cathedral itself is a striking example of eclectic historicism: its exterior is defined by refined Neoclassical lines, its interior by Neo-Gothic grandeur, while the crypt—marked by heavy columns and rounded arches—belongs to a Neo-Romanesque revival. As the conceptual starting point of the series, Cuesta de la Vega signals Crihană’s ongoing interest in cities shaped by layered histories and enduring architectural identities.
