Page 20 - VICTOR HAGEA : Amazing

The title of the painting points out to the personages Different hystologic textures of marble pave the floor
inhabiting the artist’s studio, in short, the models caught
up in various hypostases and attitudes. One could see a
model in flesh and bones, sitting, absorbed in a state of
contemplative expectation of her creator; then, different
statues, represented in stone (alabaster), or illusionistic
depicted on the canvas placed on the easel. From this
perspective, there is apparently nothing special about
this studio, it is no different from any other painting
studio. Yet this painting exemplary points out again to
different modes of creation in pictorial representation
– a theme recurrent throughout Hagea’s work. This is
how one should understand the presence of the bound
statue of Marsyas in painting, depicted on the easel.
This is a dramatic vision touching upon the origins and
nature of creation. Marsyas is bound up and flayed
by Apollo after his defeat in front of the god of music
and poetry. By flaying Marsyas, Apollo, the winner of
the contest, wanted to show that creation is a painful
endeavour, which necessarily involves sacrifice. Hagea
intensifies this perception by playing on the visual
contrast between the free winged statue of Nike and
the bound Marsyas. But there is definitely something
more in the atmosphere, impossible to describe, like the
air, or the perfume, which makes the studio even more
dense in meaning. There is no wonder that about the
so-called stone porus, resembling the marble Paros by its
whiteness and its hardness, it was said that has the power
to conserve intact the bodies. What we know about
the marble of Paros is that it has itself the reputation
to preserve admirably the incense. Therefore, one must
not overlook that this vast studio, the recipient in which
these heroic bodies evolve, is all made out of marble.
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of the studio, and wrap around this magic recipient,
which is the laboratory of artistic creation. If we follow
the idea that each kind of marble has veins running
thought it, one may say that the impression of a veined
marble (marmo macchiato) is nothing but a symptom
of incarnation (macatura della carne). The whole space
of the studio looks like a vast open incarnated body, the
sacrosanct temple, where the act of creation goes from
gestation to revelation. Like the living flesh of the altar
upon which the sacrifice is usually performed, this studio
projects the same vision of hierophanic space where the
artist himself silently performs his own sacrifice, in the
likeness of the Abrahamic gesture. Like an enormous
ampula, holding the incense or oil brought from the
holy place, this space made out of a kind of porus
stone keeps heroes immortal, turning them in a kind
of reliques. Pale bodies, images of mineral luminosity,
they are epiphanic signs of creation in its Apollonian
instantiation. On the painter’s easel, itself a sort of
altar table in the likeness of the sacrosanct space of the
studio, the image of Marsyas dominates as a metaphor
of the creative labour. What Heroes of Studio actually
wants to visually tell us is about the artistic credo of
the artist, which is exemplary for the human race as a
whole. This is about the struggle in which he is caught
up by the dynamic forces of the Apollonian and of the
Dionysian (Marsyas being a minister of Dionysus, the
god of ecstasy) – the two divine models that he adopts
in order to overcome his limited human condition.
Nicoletta Isar
25th October 2008