Page 69 - Masters

master

VICTOR HAGEA

Lives and works in München, germany

SEARCH THE ARTIST ONLINE www.victor-hagea.de

Surface and decoy -The Painting as Seduction
Few thoughts around and about victor Hagea’s imagery
- there is a virtual dimension at stake in the image, a
kind of spatiality there, of which william gibson might
say that “There’s no there.” The surface of the paint is
as virtual as it makes all boundaries permeable: see
there, in the painting “Dream” (2001), “The Tissue of
Ariadne” (2002), or 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 skillfully hidden. There is no trace of difference.
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-between’s 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
waste 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
lust from which one cannot escape. The transparent
screen of this kind of concept-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.
Nicoletta Isar, critic, writer
tHe WINDOW OF HeaVeN
2005 OIL ON CANvAS 32,3’x24 IN. / 82x 61 CM. 
65
masters of today