by Hagea

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Summer Clouds

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Summer Clouds: The “dawn” of the painting or painting as phenomenology “The world was beautiful before it became real,” said Bachelard in his L’air et les songes. Essai sur l’imagination du movement. In the airy imagination of Bachelard, the blue sky is equally unreal as it is impalpable; it has the dreamy substance of the blue gaze. We believe that we look at the blue sky, says Bachelard, but suddenly the blue sky looks back at us. This exclusive metaphorical vision, Bachelard borrows from the poet Paul Eluard and his poem book “Donner à voir.” “Donner à voir” is a poetical line that may help us come close to Hagea’s own vision of painting as a phenomenological “showing” (donner à voir) – the vision of the phenomena of blue sky and summer clouds. Inspired by Eluard, but also by Hölderlin and Mallarmé, in his chapter “Le ciel bleu” from L’air et les songes Bachelard elaborates on the airy imagination and the process of coming to being of poetical vision. The vision of the airy dreamer (rêveur aérien) is such that it has the purity of an instant poetical vision (donnée immediate de la conscience poétique). Gazing at the blue sky, the poet (Eluard) grasps immediately its original matter (la matière première). This return to the origins has also the effect of “presencing” of the act of vision. “Qu’est-ce que le bleu?” “Le bleu est l’obscurité devenue visible.” Bachelard intently changes the past tense into the present tense because, he thinks, there is no past in the region of the imagination. He writes: “Le bleu est l’obscurité devenant visible.” Vision comes to being instantly, letting it appear to the eye, but at the same time it erases the borders between night and day, between obscurity and diaphaneity, in a dynamic of “awakening.” This is the phenomenology of vision, the movement of coming to being of the visible according to Bachelard. The blue sky is by excellence a permanent vision of the dawn – the break of day. “Le ciel bleu est une aurore permanente.” Summer clouds is in that respect this vision of the dawn’s early light – the Aurora – embodied allegorically by this splendid body Venus-like, coming out into being from the airy and sonorous substance of air, tuned from the coiling shell. Blue eyes turned back to the dreamer, indeed, she is an airy figure herself of airy imagination. It is only by living this mirage of the dawn’s early hour, experiencing this permanent awakening (l’éveil), says Bachelard, that we can understand the paradoxical movement of an immobile sky. As Eluard says, “Il n’y a pas de couleur immobile.” The blue sky has by definition the movement of an awakening. Vision of the blue sky is paradoxical, it seems as if it is the space where there is nothing more to imagine, but when the airy imagination is animated the background becomes active. In its most dreamy and dynamic form, the imagination finds there the elements of a Gestalttheorie at work to reveal the universe. As Bachelard says, “The clouds help us to dream of transformation.” The clouds are the day's zoomorphism as the constellations are the night's zoomorphism. They are the aerial imagination of the soul of the things of the world. They show how things are constantly moving, changing, and transforming. Such are Victor Hagea’s Summer Clouds – a phantasmatic vision, permanent aurore made out herself of airy clouds. This vision has also much in common with Mallarmé’s Azur, as well as with Hölderlin’s pure and sacred air out of which the seasons and weather descent. To make an image is to let image appear (donner à voir), come to being, where vision itself is a constant and dreamy “awakening.” (Text by Nicoletta Isar, VICTOR HAGEA AMAZING ART ISBN 13: 9789189685239)

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