Paul Neagu. Generative Codes offers a synthetic vision of Paul Neagu’s trajectory, from his experiments with tactile art, initiated in Romania and continued in the United Kingdom, to the construction of complex artistic systems expressed through drawing, object, performative actions, and, later, sculpture.

Paul Neagu is an experimental artist who created expansive constellations of works, unified by the aspiration to achieve wholeness through “open axiomatic” artistic formulas. He regarded art as a vector of communication and convergence, while remaining equally concerned with the physical, material concreteness of artistic expression, in conjunction with the many philosophical and spiritual inquiries he attached to the subjects he explored.

The exhibition proposes an immersion into Neagu’s theoretical and formal universe, presenting all his working media and the stages of his development, with a particular focus on a central dimension of his practice: the importance of expressive formulas that evoke ritual. This is understood both as a communicational relay—a means of sharing collective experiences—and as a way of reaching inter- and trans-subjective states with cosmological and metaphysical valences.

From the very beginning of his trajectory, Neagu constructed objects intended to interact with their environment, placing them in public spaces in Bucharest or staging demonstrations that evoked procedures specific to magic performances. Within performative sequences, these “boxes” are opened to reveal their interior sections, composed of reticular structures, enigmatic objects, and kaleidoscopic arrangements.

Immediately following this phase, encouraged by his contact with the international art scene, Paul Neagu formulated the Tactile Art Manifesto, in which he advocated for the reactivation of all the senses in the perception of the surrounding world and of “artistic products.” This direction generated “the idea of the concrete, tangible, manipulable, tactile, portable object, perhaps agreeable or […] unsettling, yet as necessary as daily bread and as the love of every breath.”

The overcoming of the subject–object dichotomy is further developed through actions such as Cake Man, a happening organized shortly after Neagu’s relocation to London, in which the part–whole relationship is explored through the symbolic decomposition and recomposition of the human body, conceived as an ensemble of “cells.” Within this collective action, the cells—made of wafers, baked and assembled with cream on site—are ritually consumed by the participants present at the event.

The series of cellular drawings deepens this dialectic of union and separation, highlighting the idea of totality, most vividly represented through numerous diagrams that present the human body as a unified whole. The fragmentation and reconstitution of this whole are further explored in Neagu’s most intense experimental phase, through the invention of the Generative Art Group, a fictive collective of artists, each with their own personality and mode of operation, engaged in various performative scenarios—individual or collective—exploring strategies of defamiliarization, anamorphic distortions, and metamorphoses.

This investigation of the relationship between fragmentation and unification, accompanied by the sporadic intrusion of the esoteric, is followed by an interest in sculptural vocabulary, inaugurated by Neagu’s major invention: the Hyphen, the bridge—the sign of union and separation. The Hyphen, a tripod supporting a rectangular surface, incorporates within its formal structure the dynamism of the human body in its leap toward the transcendent.

This entity represents the nodal point from which Neagu’s other sculptural projects develop, translated remarkably into both two- and three-dimensional formulas. The Nine Catalytic Stations are each endowed with their own dynamic vectors, distinct force relations, varied materialities, and carefully balanced alternations between solid and void. According to Neagu, they behave like living organisms, dancing or interacting like an orchestra. As he once remarked, himself surprised by the subtly articulated spaces generated through their interrelation, these sculptures “began to speak on their own and to emit a music, an energy that even I, their ‘creator,’ had not anticipated.”