For Paul Neagu, art is an expression of "desire in the face of the systems that attempt to inhibit it," as he writes, and desire involves "the recovery" of what he calls, variously, the "hyphen," the "abstract," the "gamma," all of which involve the "bodily," conveyed particularly through the "figural essence of sculpting, paintings, drawings." Neagu's works, whatever their medium, are certainly full of desire, as their visceral energy suggests. The Gamma paintings of 1973 are luminous bursts of cosmic energy, radiating like the rays of a distant sun from the core of consciousness, and telescoped into immediacy by artistic science. At once Pointillist and Futurist, the spectral lines of force evoke the "Big Bang" with which the cosmos began. It is the sudden moment of creation, of seemingly spontaneous generation - the glorious moment when energy and system are one, that is, when system has not yet crystallized into inhibiting structure and energy has not yet dissipated into structureless atmosphere. The energy of the Gamma paintings seems illimitable and inexhaustible, and at once material and immaterial - simultaneously concrete and pure.

It is clearly an erotic moment, as the turbulence of Open Monolith, 1992 makes clear. For Neagu, the cosmos is created by an enormous orgasmic discharge, and so is the self, as Hyphen Phallus Self, 1984-91 implies: the sculpted hyphen is a self-symbol. It is Neagu/s signature form, and his most innovative creation - a major contribution to abstract art. Circle and rectangle integrate in a suavely convulsive geometry. The result is a hermetic whole with no one center: a self-sufficient unity of incommensurate forms that embodies the energy - the urgent force of desire - that effects the unity. Energy flows between the geometrical opposites, anchoring it with their clarity. Indeed, geometrical form and gestural energy are one and the same in Neagu's singular shape. It is fantasy figure and pure form in one. There is something at once grotesque and sublime - extravagant and austere - about Neagu's hyphen, as one might expect from a union of absolute incommensurates. Neagu's hyphen is ingeniously dialectic: its elements remain autonomous even as their difference is resolved. The result is an elegant baroque harmony'a dynamic grand gesture that is at the same time classically perfect.

For all its autonomy, Neagu often associates his hyphen with nature, as Hyphen on Elm and Hyphen on Seed, both 1986 indicate. Made of wood, the former is a biomorphic construction, while the latter, also of wood, resembles an archaic string instrument - an Orphic lyre, as it were, disabled by time.