Page 60 - VICTOR HAGEA : Amazing

of Ariadne – out of which this paradoxical reality, the which reflects an inner struggle typical for the airy
tiny interstice of his canvases, is weaved out, which
the French so beautifully reflects in the word-play
voile- toile.
To understand Hagea’s ontology of the body one must
turn to his Genesis. Out of the thread of the “golden
chain” (aurea catena) of Homer (Iliad, the eighth
book) our fate is fraily suspended and framed. The
drama of Creation/Genesis is the drama of wakening “Voice is a kind of sound characteristic of what has
out from the state of white statuary inocence to a
fleshly presence. This is a spectacular burst out, an
act of 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, with its flesh-skin
symbolism, that the body reveals its whole splendor.
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
of Serres’ turbulent cosmos in status nascendi,
and with Derrida’s “clin d’hymen” in the flow of
rythmos. From this perspective, Genesis appears
as the utmost instantiation of the feminin Soul in
its cosmogenetic state, which is a rise upwards, as
well as a fall, an inclination, “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,
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imagination described by Gaston Bachlard in his
Air and Dreams (1988), but also to 1499 Poliphilo’s
erotic phantasy, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (The
Strife of Love in a Dream).
But 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,
soul in it; nothing that is without soul utters voice.”
Genesis – with her open mouth – has some kind of
voice, although inaudible, a primordial hiss perhaps,
which is the grain that constitutes voice, and proffers
the first scream, the primal utterance. Genesis is a
vocal epiphany, as much as it is 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!
After the discontent with the abject bodies and the
exquisite corps of postmodernity, Hagea’s poetics of
subtle body is a refreshing vision. What Hagea does is
put in a new perspective the figurative tradition, and
struggle for the wakening of the gods. He wants by all
means to recuperate the original splendor of human
anatomy in its mystical and sacrosanct origination.
Yet his gods and goddesses are mostly in a dormant
state, like the “sleeping waters” of the primordial
chaos before genesis, longing to be woken up and
start to unfold their dance.
Nicoletta Isar