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VICTOR HAGEA
Lives and works in munchen, germany
 www.victor-hagea.de
artist contact
 vichagea@yahoo.de
sUMMer CLOUds, 2006 oiL on canvas 31,5x23,6 in. / 80x60 cm.
Surface and decoy. The Painting as Seduction
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 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
lust from which one cannot escape. The transparent
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.
Nicoletta Isar, curator, critic