Paul Neagu

Description

This sculpture is linked to a series of works started in 1983 which are illustrated in Reorganisation of Nothing published by Generative Art Trust, London, in 1996. Paul Neagu has a long-standing interest in eschatology, the theological doctrine concerned with death and final destiny, which for him generates speculative concepts of a cosmological future. In the material form of sculpture the highly reflective surfaces of stainless steel and polished bronze are appropriate vehicles to realise these concepts. Also the form they take - the circle and globe - at once infinite and finite, encourages the viewer to think beyond the physical reality of the work. Neagu writes that he is seeking, 'a transfigurative brightness, a tangible near-perfect paradise. The spheres are all marked with my name, the artist "me" is atomised, dispensable, potentially unstable as all universes are.'

The spheres are prefabricated boules, produced at a factory in Lyons, La Boule Integrale. In this work they are a metaphor for atomic particles, and the fact that they are not made by the artist's hand is his way of depersonalising the subject. When asked about the colour in this sculpture, the warm bronze against the cooler steel, Neagu said that very rarely does he tamper with the natural colour of the materials he uses because he selects them with their natural qualities in mind.

'Unnamed (Eschaton)... helps me to remember a minute golden bracelet made by an Etruscan craftsman (600 BC). I saw it at Villa Giulia in Rome. It contained a couple of hundred tiny lions, about 4 mm each. It also brings to mind a detail of a relief sculpture by Nicola Pisano (born c.1220) in the Duomo in Siena which contains a small area of about forty portraits, part of the Final Judgment. Artists sometimes feel the need to express a preview of paradise... '