Homeostasis
/1
- Homeostasis
- 1973
- oil on canvas
- 42,5 × 34,6 cm
Before arriving in Bucharest for his art studies in 1960, Paul Neagu worked as a topographer and draughtsman in Timișora. These experiences influenced his relationship with drawing, as one can see in his diagrammatic and axonometric graphic works with the constant presence of numerical notations and the rigorous process of deconstruction and reconstitution of the human form from the articulation and combination of individual, variously sized cells. The recurrent, iconic representation of the human hand, presented as a honeycomb structure consisting of variable numbers of cells, brings to the foreground Neagu’s analytical focus on researching the whole through a single part. The artist is not interested in the hand’s anatomy, but rather in its “atomy”—a reference to the fact the human body is “full of atoms.” This study of the hand and the matrix of fingers, along with their intricate relationship with a matchbox (his letter box, as it appears in another version of the drawing), points out Neagu’s metaphysical approach to “understanding the world, and its relations.” As the artist himself states: the human hand is a cosmic hand. Furthermore, his rendering of the hand as a microcosm allows Neagu to distinguish between the senses of tactility (meaning the fingers) and palpability (meaning the hand as a whole), which are for him the two points of entry into the human cosmos. A.Se.