“Frames”

“Rebus”

There is also, among those stills, Rebus – an intriguing vision of a woman whose body is almost entirely covered by a squared folded impenetrable metal. The image behind the strange shield could only be guessed, as in a rebus. Like in the Unveiling, the screen disguising the woman’s body in Rebus opens up sporadically in some windows torn in the metal, to display esoteric symbols. Their meaning is no doubt significative – like everything Hagea does. But I must insist on the metapictorial effect of the image because this seems to be also part of the artist’s project. Again, Hagea plays with visibilities and invisibilities.

We may agree that the main discourse or, the text of the picture, is the woman’s body, the eternal sacrosanct mystery. The split meta-pictures in the windows are no doubt attempts to penetrate this ineffable enigma. They are meta-pictures, or para-texts, like in para/ergon. Let us come close to this important term. Paragon is what is added to the work (ergon), and according to some interpretations, it is what might be in conflict with it. As Derrida puts it, “parergon is against, next to and extra to the ergon, the work done.” In Hagea’s opus (ergon), these parergonal images are presumably some visual glossing around and about that impenetrable vision, which could only be contemplated as in a mirror, placed in a kind of mis en abîme. Indeed, in spite of the figurality and the visibility of the meta-pictures, the meaning of ergon remains undisclosed, it is a mere rebus essentially obscure. But as Derrida (La vérité en peinture, Paris, 1978, 63) argues, parergon is not totally lost. From a specific exterior point, it touches and cooperates within the operation. Neither completely exterior to the main discourse, not simply within it, it is a vision which we, the spectators, must accommodate alongside.

We may also read Hagea’s perplexing picture with J. Hillis Miller’s deconstructivist theory (Deconstruction and Criticism, New York, 1979, 219), where para is a “double antithetical prefix,” signifying at once proximity and distance, interiority and exteriority. Para- is a “permeable membrane” connecting inside and outside, placing the outside in, and the inside out, dividing and joining them. And this might be, after all, the very nature of this picture, a reflection of wit and grace of the artist, which enchants us, and once again seduces our soul. This is such a game (concetto in Spanish Baroque) in which we let ourselves be engaged.

“Italian Project”

70 x 70 cm, 2006, oil on canvas

“Lights And Shadows”

“Window”

Window is a spectacular vision unveiled by a huge reflective metallic curtain, which occupies half of the picture plan. Paradoxical in its unusual appearance, this metallic silk curtain opens up the picture’s stage like a dream. The vision is the other half of the picture, but one could say that the whole picture is the window in which a Venetian vista is revealed. Here is the usual romantic bridge, the gondola. But what really catches the eye like a magnet is the enigmatic body of the lady in crimson in the foreground – a rubicund vision amplified and reverberated in the reflective squares of the folded curtain. Carmine highlights pierce the metal, intensifying the magic view of this passionate body. Indeed, her sanguine dress evokes the whole pathos which makes her gaze languish, her lips move with sensual desire. She holds at bay the Venetian passion, she is a figure of love, death, and fluid desire.

It might be interesting to note also that in this dreamy and spectacular composition, the reflective surface of the metallic curtain meets the liquid of the canal – as if in a chimerical vision. It is in this cone of vision and encounter between these two impossibilities that the lady’s body seems to originate, herself a liquefied erotic vision. Like a nymph, her enigmatic body comes out from the waters. Masked by a black lace, half sfumatto, her face emerges from the mist of the canal, making her apparition even more mysterious. Venice is no doubt the most enigmatic place, the place where the gaze must be disguised and where the bodies become theatrical, the magic space, indeed, where any place becomes the stage for a pathetic drama.
(Text by Nicoletta Isar, VICTOR HAGEA AMAZING ART ISBN 13: 9789189685239)

“Romance”

“Pyramid of ephemeral encounters”

61 x 82 cm, 2006, oil on canvas

“Genesis”

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 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.

“Queen Of The Fairytales”

“Still Life with black pot”

“Still life with blue vase”

“The Remains Of The Day”

“Forgotten Things”

The “painting within a painting” seems to be a favourite theme for Victor Hagea. It was present in the meta-pictorial vision of the Unveiling, and in Rebus, which I have already discussed. But it resurfaces again in a series of stills, like Forgotten Things, Chilean Wine, or even in Italian Project. It consistently takes the shape of a puzzling item, a piece of paper torn, severed, or broken, and then pinned down on the background of the painting. Formally, this is a visual quotation we recognize from the Dutch Masters, which the artist welcomes in his paintings. What is the effect of such encounter will be the theme of my further reflection. But first, let us rehearse the original meaning of this puzzling detail, which Hagea seems to love very much.

The piece of paper belongs to a large family of images, like scrolls, cartellinos, and even skin-like rolled canvases, present in the 17th c. Stills. They have been all perceived as metaphors of the picture representation, in general, but they all send to a deeper meaning, the vision of painting as skin. Why is it so, and from where does it come such excentric idea?

The idea of canvas as a skin stretched upon the frame of the painting, just as the skin is wrapped around the human body, is an old metaphor in the history of images. The story behind this metaphor is Marsyas myth reporting the contest between Marsyas, the god of music, and Apollo, the god of poetry. Behind the fable stands the symbolic contest between poetry and music, the confrontation between the Apollonian and the Dionysian, which results in the flaying of Marsyas. The message of this pathetic vision is pregnant with meaning in that which concerns the origins and nature of creation. By flaying Marsyas, Apollo, the winner of the contest, wanted to show that creation is a painful endeavour, one which involves sacrifice. But he wanted to teach also “the proper way to skin the Fable,” that is, to discover the hidden meaning which stands behind the surface, and this is the strategy of any exegetical interpretation.

The peeling off canvas as if one would flay out skin resurfaces in Mannerism as a powerful vision, particularly cultivated by such artists like Michelangelo, but is present also in the epochal work of the anatomist Vesalius, which gave the first description of the human body in his De humanis corpore fabrica (1543). This visual scheme pops out again in still-life genre, but this time turns the anatomical into a playful game: paper scrolls and cartellinos become skin metaphors, glossing around the transient epidermis of things in representation. They are no doubt good subjects to display the excellence of pictorial skill. The image comes back in the imagination of the Surrealist painters. I think, it might be fair to say that Hagea’s painting could be placed in-between these two streams. The artist is no doubt deeply concerned with the drama of his time, but in his stills he emphatically points out to the past, like in the title of his painting – Forgotten things. We are almost sure that the “forgotten things” are the exquisite res of the Old Dutch Masters. He is obviously much indebted to them, at least in formal terms. He wants to rescue from oblivion the forgotten things, to resurrect them, to reconstruct, or rather to “deconstruct” their trajectory, not so much the technique, but their spirit. The Italian project is an exemplary piece in that respect; it is also a research project of the artist himself. He deliberately juxtaposes Raffaello di Bartolomeo known as Raffaellino Del Garbo’s sketch of hands (1470-1512) to Caravaggio’s hands in his “Calling of Saint Matthews” (1599-1600), trying to follow in time the development of this pattern of representation, breaking though the chronological time. He shows how the imaginary operates beyond time on the level of memory, carrying out the forms, and bringing them back as epiphanic signs. And this is exactly how the metapictorial works.

Hagea takes up the Vanitas theme established already in 17th c., but turns it into a postmodern existentialist reflection upon life, death, and the vanity of things. Indeed, an unmistakable sense of impermanence dominates the pictures. Thus, his little broken pieces of paper are like old reliques coming from the past, forgotten things, and found again, fragile bodies of butterflies from a lost memory. They are mnemonic signs, visions of painting as memory, lost and recovered again. Hagea’s painting is at once, a memento mori and a sublime gesture to resist oblivion. Because oblivion and remembering are the two facettes of the same coin, or rather say, of the same squared painting. Within its surface, the invisible hand of the artist meets the eye of the viewer, brushing the painting surface in worship and pure amazement at the painter’s skill. We may call this, the moment of paradoxality of painting. The paradox derives from this impossible association between that, which is impermanent, and that which is made now permanent. Durably contained in matter, almost solidified like a gem, the forgotten things seem as if inscribed in immanence, as well as in eternity. At the same time, the piece of paper, fragile in its appearance, faded out by time, points out dramatically to the thin layer of matter which is the sole reality of the thing, behind which there is nothing. No hidden meaning, no architext, or palimpsest, is expected to be revealed. The most pregnant meaning resists any flaying. And this is so, because the same eternal aporia seems to hunt the human condition: the play of memory. Man is under the power of dices, no matter where the metro ticket might take him, no matter how glorious his hand-made creation is, as long as the shadow casts even upon the most exquisite deep-blue vase. This is inexorably the sign of transience, and the reflection of our mortal condition, namely, to forget and to constantly remember things. Here, Hagea meets Magritte’s La condition humaine, a vision of impermanence of the world, a mere epidermic and fragile surface.

“Waiting for Icarus”

85 x 100 cm, 2008, oil on canvas

“The last act”

100 x 130 cm, 2011, oil on canvas