The Window Of Heaven Painting

Painting the Flight – Of Dream, Air and Imagination Victor Hagea’s painting The Window Of Heaven (2005) shows a most puzzling ascending body in slow motion and dramatic raccourci – almost like a bird. This makes one think that the painting is about the flight towards Heaven. This dreamy, pneumatic body, wrapped like an angle in its opaline, iridescent folds, places us unmistakably beyond any physics – straight into a meta-physical realm. What is the nature of this space? What is the substance of such body? Which body could defy gravitation with the grace of an angel? These are of course rhetorical questions, but real challenges for the artist, in which dream, air and imagination are at work in the making of image. Air and dream are for Gaston Bachelard, the French philosopher, the paradoxical matter of imagination, and the nature and spiritual dimension of the soul. It is perhaps here that Victor Hagea’s vision should be inscribed: in the imaginative aspiration of man towards the flight – le vol – which has never deserted its inner most soul since the fall. The dream of flight is the archetypal image of the soul in its ascensional motion and desire to overcome the loss of wings. But as Bachelard writes: "I will therefore, postulate as a principle that in the dream world we do no fly because we have wings; rather, we think we have wings because we have flown. Wings are a consequence. The principle of oneiric flight goes deeper. Dynamic aerial imagination must rediscover this principle.” (Air and Dreams) The Window Of Heaven is about coming to terms with these matters, and the painting itself is also about being or not-being winged. The image is an intense meditation upon the fall which apparently left mankind wingless. This is emphatically expressed in the painting in the juxtaposition between the winged goddess Nike, and the wingless human hand holding the ephemeral laurel of victory. Human being is a dreamy being, constantly aiming towards the beyond, searching to cross the threshold (window/gate) to Heaven, and eventually regain the original imponderable body, which matches the substance of air in paradise. Among elements, in Bachelard’s material imagination, air concerns most the soul’s motion. According to him, the nature of soul is motion. And it is precisely this airy motion which mystically seems to move upwardly the body. Rather than moving itself by itself, the body is being moved, as if being carried out by the aspiration of the soul, the soul's attraction to God. At the same time, an invisible force seems to pull it upwards – God's breath pulling on the soul. This vision brings to mind the powerful image at the ends of times: “Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up (pulled up with force; Greek haireomai) together with them in the clouds to meet God in the air (Thessalonians 4.17) Nicoletta Isar 25th September 2008

Painting:Oil on Canvas

Original:One-of-a-kind Artwork

Size:24 W x 32.3 H x 0.8 D in

Delivery Time:Typically 5-7 business days for domestic shipments, 10-14 business days for international shipments.