Full Moon Hyphen, 1979, with its display of seeds within an all-encompassing circle, confirms that the hyphen is as much primitive fertility symbol as sophisticated modernist sculpture. Even at its most abstract and machine-like there is a sexual, organic dimension to Neagu's hyphens, as the seed-like balls that accompany Small Hyphen, 1988-89 and Hyphen Curves, 1988-90 imply. Their stainless steel is a modern material, but they have an elemental flavor, perhaps most obviously in Guerilla-Hyphen, 1980. Thus Neagu's hyphen is simultaneously "impure" and pure - a primordially expressive, provocative figure as well as an
autonomous, even hermetic abstract form. What is astonishing is the freedom with which Neagu uses the hyphen without destroying its self-identity. Each transformation seems a gain in the sense of self rather than a threat to identity.

Neagu's sculpted hyphen can be understood as an emblem of the energy displayed in the Gamma paintings - a kind of condensation of their explosiveness. But the painted hyphen sometimes looks as though it is ready to explode, as the feverish painterliness which surrounds it suggests. The atmosphere threatens to dissolve the hyphen like an amorphous halo. Neagu's color epitomizes this ambiguity: it conveys the intensity of the unresolved process even as it heightens the appearance of the hyphen. The hyphen seems to float on clouds of transcendental color, suggesting it is a sacred form. Neagu's color tends to be dazzling, as in Hyphen Chora-Force, 1998, but it is sometimes gray and melancholy, as in Hyphen Phallus Self. Open Monolith is a tour de force of Abstract Expressionism, overflowing with tragically conflicting colors that nonetheless converge perceptually. They are the dramatic mist in which the mirage of the hyphen magically appears, a bizarre revelation emerging from the unfathomable cosmos-a sign from above that signals the emotional depths below.

There is another side to Neagu: long before hybrid forms became fashionable Neagu was making them. Foot Cells, Human Head Cells, H. H. 81C, and H. H. 88, along with many other works from 1973, are at once abstract grids, human figures (or parts of the figure), two dimensional, and illustionistic, as the cellular compartments indicate. One might say a conceptual hyphen links them. From the start, Neagu was among the most imaginative avant-garde innovators, all the more so because his works make a conceptual point without sacrificing physical presence. Neagu's work is uncategorizable because it cuts through avant-garde preconceptions while assimilating its conventions into his own radical vision of the relationship of art and mind.