Page 54 - VICTOR HAGEA : Amazing

Victor Hagea’s painting The Window Of Heaven The Window Of Heaven is about coming to terms

(2005) shows a most puzzling ascending body in with these matters, and the painting itself is also

slow motion and dramatic raccourci – almost like a about being or not-being winged. The image is an
bird. This makes one think that the painting is about intense meditation upon the fall which apparently

the flight towards Heaven. This dreamy, pneumatic left mankind wingless. This is emphatically expressed

body, wrapped like an angle in its opaline, iridescent in the painting in the juxtaposition between the

folds, places us unmistakably beyond any physics – winged goddess Nike, and the wingless human hand
straight into a meta-physical realm. holding the ephemeral laurel of victory. Human

being is a dreamy being, constantly aiming towards

What is the nature of this space? What is the substance the beyond, searching to cross the threshold (window/
of such body? Which body could defy gravitation gate) to Heaven, and eventually regain the original

with the grace of an angel? These are of course imponderable body, which matches the substance of

rhetorical questions, but real challenges for the artist, air in paradise.

in which dream, air and imagination are at work in
the making of image. Air and dream are for Gaston Among elements, in Bachelard’s material imagination,

Bachelard, the French philosopher, the paradoxical air concerns most the soul’s motion. According to

matter of imagination, and the nature and spiritual him, the nature of soul is motion. And it is precisely

dimension of the soul. It is perhaps here that Victor this airy motion which mystically seems to move
Hagea’s vision should be inscribed: in the imaginative upwardly the body. Rather than moving itself by

aspiration of man towards the flight – le vol – which itself, the body is being moved, as if being carried out

has never deserted its inner most soul since the fall. by the aspiration of the soul, the soul’s attraction to

The dream of flight is the archetypal image of the soul God. At the same time, an invisible force seems to pull
in its ascensional motion and desire to overcome the it upwards – God’s breath pulling on the soul. This

loss of wings. vision brings to mind the powerful image at the ends

of times: “Then we which are alive and remain shall

But as Bachelard writes: “I will therefore, postulate be caught up (pulled up with force; Greek haireomai)

as a principle that in the dream world we do no fly together with them in the clouds to meet God in the

because we have wings; rather, we think we have wings air (Thessalonians 4.17)

because we have flown. Wings are a consequence.
The principle of oneiric flight goes deeper. Dynamic Nicoletta Isar

aerial imagination must rediscover this principle.” 25th September 2008

(Air and Dreams)

54 lA fenêtre dU ciel 2005 HUile SUr toile 32x24 in. /82x61 cm. tHe WindoW of HeAVen 2005 oil on cAnVAS 32x24 in. /82x61 cm. 
HimmelSfenSter 2005 Öl AUf leinWAnd 32x24 in. /82x61 cm.
fereAStrA cerUlUi 2005 Ulei Pe PAnzA 32x24 in. /82x61 cm.