Page 31 - VICTOR HAGEA : Amazing

as artist, and prevent his encounter with contrejour light effect, but the cause of the
the Absolute. Although very personal in its
origins and its expression, the painting has
some universal value to convey: it concerns
the humanity as a whole. Let us look at the
image.
The image is focused upon a body placed
in the foreground and at the centre of the
painting, around which everything revolves.
This is an anthropological vision, the usual
projection of human imagination upon gods
or concepts in Greek mythology, which
often takes the shape of human appearance.
This superb body, sculpture-like, is however
slightly ambiguous in its lower part, placed
as if between realms – human and divine.
He possibly personifies Chronos – judging
after the clock mounted upon his plexus.
It is nevertheless a human vision of that
cosmological fervor before time, being and
creation, the moment before Time itself
got killed. Commenting on this remote
event in the history of the cosmos, Hagea
exclaimed rhetorically: “This is a huge
metaphor.” The metaphor is contained in
the very unfolding of the story, whose end
is the triumph of the timeless (and fate-less)
god/Zeus on the expense of the collapse of
Time, that is, Chronos. I have the strong
feeling that this very dramatic moment – the
sunset of Time – is depicted in the image.
This sunset is not a mere reflection of some
ontological inclination (clinament) of the
cosmos due to this radical change. There
is an almost imperceptible pensive sadness
in the air, carried by the melancholy pose
of Chronos, and by the penumbra of his
face. His dark Saturnian prosopon (“face”
in Greek) is coloured by the black-bile of
his fallen condition. Hagea’s Chronos is
no doubt a tragic and rather gloomy figure,
and tragic is any human being who may
fall under the trap of Chronos’ misleading
temporality. Therefore, man must fight
chronological time; one must escape from
the spell of temporal transience and move
on to the ocean of eternity. That eternity
is out of reach in the image, only discretely
suggested in the background horizon. The
space of our chronological drama, that is
to say, its topos, has a specific substance
that allows shadow to be cast on the
ground, on the face, in the air. We may call
this a “chronotop” – the suitable ambient
space for the chronological time where the
penumbra weaves its melancholy poetics of
transience. By contrast, no shadow could be
found in the space of the Absolute but clear
light. Serenity could not project shadow
anywhere there simply because the bodies
have a different substance, which is beyond
matter, beyond time.
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