Page 48 - VICTOR HAGEA : Amazing

Summer CloudS

“The world was beautiful before it became real,”

said Bachelard in his L’air et les songes. Essai

sur l’imagination du movement. In the airy
imagination of Bachelard, the blue sky is equally

unreal as it is impalpable; it has the dreamy

substance of the blue gaze. We believe that we
look at the blue sky, says Bachelard, but suddenly

the blue sky looks back at us. This exclusive

metaphorical vision, Bachelard borrows from

the poet Paul Eluard and his poem book “Donner

à voir.” “Donner à voir” is a poetical line that
may help us come close to Hagea’s own vision

of painting as a phenomenological “showing”

(donner à voir) – the vision of the phenomena of
blue sky and summer clouds.

Inspired by Eluard, but also by Hölderlin and
Mallarmé, in his chapter “Le ciel bleu” from L’air

et les songes Bachelard elaborates on the airy

imagination and the process of coming to being

of poetical vision. The vision of the airy dreamer
(rêveur aérien) is such that it has the purity of

an instant poetical vision (donnée immediate de

la conscience poétique). Gazing at the blue sky,

the poet (Eluard) grasps immediately its original
matter (la matière première). This return to the

origins has also the effect of “presencing” of The “dawn” of the

the act of vision. “Qu’est-ce que le bleu?” “Le

bleu est l’obscurité devenue visible.” Bachelard painting or painting
intently changes the past tense into the present

tense because, he thinks, there is no past in as phenomenology

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