Page 59 - VICTOR HAGEA : Amazing

There is a virtual dimension at stake in the image, a lust from which one cannot escape. The transparent
kind of spatiality there, of which William Gibson
might say that “There’s no there there.” The surface
of the paint is so virtual as it makes all boundaries
permeable: see there, in the painting “Dream” (2001),
“The Tissue of Ariadne” (2002), or in “Genesis” (2003),
how walls collapse into marine weaves or linen folds,
but no contour can delimit the specificity of such
things. Their physicality is denied, transformed, and
transfigured. They are neither objects, nor atmospheric
phenomena, objects become ineffable phenomena
and phenomena receive a magic substantiality in a
world in which the trace of their crafting is skilfully
hidden. There is no trace of differance. The fluidity of
such world makes it problematic to define the kind of
spatiality we are in. It is like a dream space, a vision,
a space of interval or in-betweenness that allows
things to cohabite and to exist side by side in their
irrationality. But the true nature of such hyper-real
space we might never get to know. Anyways, Hagea
is not present there to tell, I mean, the physicality of
his body and hand. The Master has erased totally his
masterful hand, there is only the interstice of his body,
that is, the vast surface of his hunting imagination.
The interface of his imagination is projected inside
out on the surface of these hallucinatory visions. It
fills up completely the surface of paintings, as well as
of the space beyond, crossing out the frame, spilling
into the space of the spectator.
There is a quite strong perception of the will of the
painter to engage his viewers in his hypnotic visions,
to make them acknowledge the paradoxality of their
ground, to engage them in a kind of delightful visual
screen of this kind of concetto-like image, a medium
of deception, as well as fascination, acts as a surface
with its own depths in which one can inscribe oneself
and erase one’s own traces at once. No one is finally
there in the paint, neither the artist nor his viewers,
although, in a most conspicuous way, they are all
right there. Yet Hagea’s vision is not the kind of a
mere optical illusion, neither is it a pure decoy, a
Baroque deceit of some historical extraction. Rather,
it is the reality of our own deep hyper-reality, which
he forces us to acknowledge and cultivate – it is the
space of creative imagination.
SubtlE bOdiES:
the Soul in the Veil
Surface and decoy – this is the seductive and playful
nature of Hagea’s canvases. A reality consistently
to be unveiled! There is always a veiled body in the
painting, a sky wrapped in a turburent curtain, even
the perplexic image of some soteriologic hands coming
out from a laminar flow of a heavenly curtain! There is
something primordial about this vast, overwhelming
spectacular curtained universe: the theatrum mundi
of Hagea’s visions. The proper viewing of this vision
is that of Deleuze’s folding-unfolding: “I am forever
unfolding between two folds, and if to perceive
means to unfold, then I am forever perceiving within
the folds.” (G. Deleuze, The Fold, 93) And of course,
everything must begin with the Thread – the thread
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