Touchy-feely – not | The Spectator

‘The eye is fatigued, perverted, shallow, its culture is degenerate, degraded and obsolete.’ Welcome to the Palpable Art Manifesto of Romanian sculptor Paul Neagu. Art must be accessible to all the senses, he argued, for ten fingers will explain more than two eyes and the tongue might tell yet more again. His Palpable Sculpture is the focus of an exhibition at the Henry Moore Institute that itself ‘ascends to the condition of a work of art’, according to the Scottish artist and gallerist Richard Demarco. His opinion carries weight, for it was he who brought Neagu out of Romania in 1969 to exhibit and teach in Edinburgh.

A succession of little galleries lead the viewer through Neagu’s playful mind. His curious, inventive assemblages, box-like forms often filled with gnomic grids or reduced human shapes, demand examination. There are surprising materials among the wood and metal. In one corner we see a shallow open box in which little pinned squares of gingerbread make up a human form; in another, a poster for a 1971 cake-sculpture-eating happening (£12 got you a segment of the cake and a screen print).