The exhibition Paul Neagu. Generative Codes is intended as a synthetic overview 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 on, sculpture. Paul Neagu is an experimental artist who created expansive constellations of works, infused by the aspiration to attain unity through “open axiomatic” artistic formulas. He regarded art as a vector of communication and convergence, and was intensely 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 the media he worked in, and the stages of his trajectory, with a particular focus on a dimension central to his practice: the expressive formulas that evoke those akin to ritual, understood both as a communicational relay—a means of sharing collective experiences—and as a way of reaching inter- and trans-subjective states deemed to be endowed with cosmological and metaphysical overtones.

From the very beginning of his trajectory, Neagu devised objects intended to interact with their environment, placing them in public spaces in Bucharest or staging demonstrations that resorted to the gestural repertoire of a magic show. When included in performative sequences, these “boxes” are opened to reveal their interior compartments, consisting in reticular structures, enigmatic objects, and kaleidoscopic arrangements. Immediately succeeding this phase, encouraged by his contact with the international art scene, Paul Neagu composed the Palpable 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 in his work generated “the idea of the concrete, palpable object one can handle, tactile, portable, agreeable perhaps, or idiotically clumsy, but necessary as the everyday bread, as the love for each moment when one breathes”

Overcoming the subject–object dichotomy is a concern further pursued 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 re-composition of the human body, conceived as an aggregation of “cells.” Within this collective action, the cells—made of waffles, baked and assembled on site—are ritually consumed by the participants present at the event. The series of cellular drawings expands the inquiry into the 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 is further explored in Neagu’s most intense experimental phase, through the invention of the Generative Art Group, a fictive collective of artists, each with his own personality and mode of operation, engaged in various performative scenarios—individual or collective—exploring strategies of estrangement, anamorphic distortions, and metamorphoses.

This investigation of the relationship between fragmentation and unification, accompanied by the sporadic intrusion of what is perceived as esoteric “events”, is followed by an interest in the vocabulary of sculpture, inaugurated through Neagu’s major invention: the Hyphen signifying 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, be it in two-or three-dimensional forms. The Nine Catalytic Stations are each endowed with their own dynamic vectors, distinct balances of forces, various materialities, and carefully calibrated alternations between solid and void. According to Neagu, they behave like living organisms, dancing or interacting, like an orchestra. As he once remarked, when gauging the subtly articulated spaces generated through their interrelation, these sculptures “started to speak on their own and to emanate a music, an energy unsuspected even by me, their “creator.”