The Children of Chronos” – The Sunset of God-Time
One thing must be said from the beginning. Victor Hagea has a kind of conflicting and inimical relation with time, more exactly, with the Chrono(s)-logical Time. This adversity towards chronological time could be described as some state of mind and being in the world. Shortly, it is a matter of either, to be possessed by Time, or to possess it. In Hagea’s ontology, the human condition unfolds between these two states of being: the condition of “man under Time” and of “man subjugating Time” or “time being subjugated by Man.” Time is a “relative matter” anyways, confessed the artist in one of our philosophical chats, to which I will further refer. “If I am outside time – he said – I am the Master of Time: I find myself in the Absolute. One must by all means remain outside time and not allow to be possessed by it. Then, one is free.”
There is not one single painting in Hagea’s creation that is not ontologically implicated. Creation is for him a mode of personal ontological clarification. But the painting The Children of Chronos seems to touch upon a most crucial aspect with existential relevance for the artist. It contains his credo as an artist, as a man-artist in the world. His credo carries inevitably the fear against anything that might threaten his freedom as artist, and prevent his encounter with the Absolute. Although very personal in its origins and its expression, the painting has some universal value to convey: it concerns the humanity as a whole. Let us look at the image.
The image is focused upon a body placed in the foreground and at the centre of the painting, around which everything revolves. This is an anthropological vision, the usual projection of human imagination upon gods or concepts in Greek mythology, which often takes the shape of human appearance. This superb body, sculpture-like, is however slightly ambiguous in its lower part, placed as if between realms – human and divine. He possibly personifies Chronos – judging after the clock mounted upon his plexus. It is nevertheless a human vision of that cosmological fervor before time, being and creation, the moment before Time itself got killed. Commenting on this remote event in the history of the cosmos, Hagea exclaimed rhetorically: “This is a huge metaphor.” The metaphor is contained in the very unfolding of the story, whose end is the triumph of the timeless (and fate-less) god/Zeus on the expense of the collapse of Time, that is, Chronos. I have the strong feeling that this very dramatic moment – the sunset of Time – is depicted in the image. This sunset is not a mere reflection of some contrejour light effect, but the cause of the ontological inclination (clinament) of the cosmos due to this radical change. There is an almost imperceptible pensive sadness in the air, carried by the melancholy pose of Chronos, and by the penumbra of his face. His dark Saturnian prosopon (“face” in Greek) is coloured by the black-bile of his fallen condition. Hagea’s Chronos is no doubt a tragic and rather gloomy figure, and tragic is any human being who may fall under the trap of Chronos’ misleading temporality. Therefore, man must fight chronological time; one must escape from the spell of temporal transience and move on to the ocean of eternity. That eternity is out of reach in the image, only discretely suggested in the background horizon. The space of our chronological drama, that is to say, its topos, has a specific substance that allows shadow to be cast on the ground, on the face, in the air. We may call this a “chronotop” – the suitable ambient space for the chronological time where the penumbra weaves its melancholy poetics of transience. By contrast, no shadow could be found in the space of the Absolute but clear light. Serenity could not project shadow anywhere there simply because the bodies have a different substance, which is beyond matter, beyond time.
Chronos is, one might speculate, the personification of the “chronological man,” a body machine governed by the God-time and its infernal machinery. This might be also visualized in the image. But there is no doubt that we are in a dramatic setting in the picture, and this is obvious from the joints of the puppet-like body of our hero, and the strings falling out from some undisclosed source. This might be an allusion to the primal condition of human being described by Plato in his dialogue The Laws. The secret of our origins is according to Plato that the human was conceived as a kind of puppet, to be a companion of gods. The fact that man has been constructed as a toy (paignion) for God, possibly as a plaything (hos paignion), or possibly with some more serious purpose, is “the finest thing about him:”
“We may imagine that each of us living creatures is a puppet made by gods, possibly as a plaything (hôs paignion) or possibly with some more serious purpose. That, indeed, is more than we can tell, but one thing is certain. These interior states are, so to say, the cords, or strings, by which we are worked; they are opposed to one another, and pull us with opposite tensions in the direction of opposite actions, and therein lies the division of virtue from vice.” (Plato, Laws I 644d-e).
And thus, the choice of man in his original performative nature is two-folded: man could become god-like through his sublime play (dance), or remain a mere plaything in the hands of the God-puppeteer moving the strings of fate. According to Plato, one should choose the serious play and not waste life on trifles. One must celebrate the gift given by the gods and make play as perfect as possible:
“All of us, then, men and women alike, must fall in with our role and spend life in making our play as perfect as possible...”
On a long term, the deep meaning of The Children of Chronos touches exactly upon this ontological free choice open to man. But for Victor Hagea, freedom has an uncompromising dimension. In his own words, freedom is a state of mind and “being outside the chronological time,” “zen-like, by which man in his finite form can communicate with the infinite (the Absolute).”
“The Children Of Cronus”
