22. New Hyphen

The philosophical concerns and searches of the conceptual artist sometimes take on the aspects of ordered chaos and reveal his interest in the division between figurative and decorative. Hesitations and progress merge harmoniously and hermetically blend in his works. Neagu extracts the most flexible shapes from his study of fractal and generative geometry, with an extraordinary plastic potential: the triangle, the rectangle and the circle, which he translates, in turn, into the form of the cone, the prism or the sphere. A multi-faceted artist, he demonstrates, like many other sculptors before him, a particular focus on drawing. For Neagu, drawing is a tool in both painting and sculpture. The attitude he adopts towards art is clearly agnostic. He prefers to appeal to consciousness and erase any trace of esotericism from his work, leaving however room for multiple possibilities of interpretation. He exhibits for the first time a work created under the auspices of the "Hyphen" in 1975, at the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford. We will notice an evolution of the concept that will stretch over several decades. From the first sketches of the Hyphen, dating from the '70s to the introduction of this "New Hyphen" around the '90s, Paul Neagu will propose and reshape an archetypal form well embedded in collective memory. The isosceles triangle of the '70s will obsessively return to sketches, drawings, objects and sculptural forms of different sizes and materials. Coming from his generative art, the "New Hyphen" will surprise the audience with varied consistency. From wood, leather or metal; to pencil, tempera, pastel or oil, the incipient tripod structure will become the catalyst element that will undergo various permutations over several decades of existence. The Hyphen has the power to connect and disconnect, but will also be perceived as a form of embracing differences. Branches and interconnected forms will be located at the border between space and time; energy and material. If initially the concept materialized in the form of a pivot or a tripodal anchor, over time it took the form of an unconventional prototype, which converges beyond the aesthetic part and takes on the intellectual valences of the form.

References

The monograph "Paul Neagu", The Paul Neagu Estate (UK), JRP editions, 2023.

Dimensions

depth 10.5 cm, width 85.5 cm, height 44 cm

Description

red granite

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