Page 28 - VICTOR HAGEA : Amazing

To understand Hagea’s ontology of the body one must Genesis – with her open mouth – has some kind of
turn to his Genesis. Out of the thread of the “golden
chain” (aurea catena) of Homer (Iliad, the eighth
book) our fate is frailly suspended and framed. The
drama of Creation/Genesis is the drama of wakening
out from the state of white statuary innocence to a
fleshly presence. This is a spectacular burst out, an
act of epiphany and pure revelation, which makes
the carcass of the inanimate body of the statue crack
down. It is out of the vitality of the curtain again, voice.” Genesis is a vocal epiphany, as much as it is
with its flesh-skin symbolism, that the body reveals
its whole splendour. The subtle, translucent body is a
prolongation of the flamed curtain, which animates
upwardly the body with its strong vitalism. It animates
and gives anima (soul) to the body, as folds are in the
soul (anima) (Deleuze, 23). But the soul is itself a higher
point of another nature, “the point of inflection,”
with some phenomenological affinity with the cosmic
clinamen (inclination) of Michel Serres describing his
turbulent cosmos in status nascendi, which has some
affinity with Derrida’s “clin d’hymen” in the flow of
primordial rythmos. From this perspective, Genesis
appears as the instantiation of the feminine Soul in its
cosmogenetic state, which is a rise upwardly, as well
as a fall, an inclination, indeed, “une chute rhythmée”,
or “une cadence inclinée.” (Derrida, “La Double
Séance,” La Dissémination, 293) This gives perhaps
the figure a sort of yearning air, the faculty of longing,
which reflects an inner struggle typical for the airy
imagination described by Gaston Bachelard in his Air
and Dreams (1988), but also taken up long ago, in
1499, by Poliphilo’s erotic phantasy, Hypnerotomachia
Poliphili (The Strife of Love in a Dream).
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voice, although inaudible, a primordial hiss perhaps,
which is the grain that constitutes materia prima
of voice, which proffers the first scream, the primal
utterance. There is truly no body and soul as such
without a voice, says Aristotle, because there is no
soul without a voice. As Aristotle points out in his
De anima, “Voice is a kind of sound characteristic of
what has soul in it; nothing that is without soul utters
a visual apparition. Her voice echoes the sonorous
body, splendid in its visual completion – and this is
the end of Creation, the fulfilment of Genesis! The
frame cuts off this vision, framing the dream in a
shot of moment infringing its anachronicity.
But the fold seems to affect all kinds of material,
the woods, the waters, papers, fabrics, living tissues,
which makes the fold “a form of expression,”
“Gestaltung,” “the genetic element or the line of
infinite inflexion.” (Deleuze) All this is visually
present in most of Hagea’s painting; moreover,
in his most fascinating and intriguing tin foils,
brazen silver-plates, and metaline pliable surfaces
of endless squared folded sheets, such as in the
Unveiling, Chilean Wine, Forgotten Things, Italian
Project, which makes yet again the pliable fold an
exemplary form of exploring the region of things,
the subcutaneous tissue in the anatomy of res. To
this vision I will now turn.
Nicoletta Isar,
Copenhagen, 12th April 2008