Victor Brauner
One of the most enigmatic Surrealist painter was Victor Brauner. Although he worked mainly in France, Victor Brauner, a Surrealist painter and sculptor, was born and raised in Romania, where he studied at the School of Fine Arts in Bucharest. In 1924 his first one-man show was presented at Bucharest's Galerie Mozart. He moved to Paris in 1930 where, through the sculptor Constantin Brâncusi (a fellow-Romanian), he met the painter Yves Tanguy who introduced him to other members of the Surrealist movement.
Gellu Naum and Victor Brauner
The Surrealists were departing not only from the realism and academicism of nineteenth-century art but also from tendencies toward painterly abstraction of the early modernists. Partly under the influence of contemporary psychology, they sought unexpected juxtapositions of sharply depicted figurative images, often recalling the landscapes of dreams. In 1934, André Breton, the leader of the Surrealist movement, wrote the introduction to the catalogue for Brauner's exhibition at the Galerie Pier.
His work shows the influence of the other Surrealists, but the modernists, such as Picasso and Klee, also, decidedly influenced him. With the advent of World War Two, Brauner left Paris and settled first in the Pyrenees and then in the Alps, where in the absence of painting materials he worked in collage. He was included in the Exposition internationale du surréalisme at the Galerie Maeght in Paris in 1947. His post-war painting incorporated forms and symbols based on Tarot cards, Egyptian hieroglyphics, and antique Mexican codices. He continued to work in a Surrealist style, despite having been officially expelled from the Surrealists by Breton. Beginning in the early 1960's, Brauner lived and worked in Varengeville, France; he represented France at the Venice Biennale in 1966, the year he died.
Fascination is one of his best known works. Muted browns and ochre tones decorate a Spartan room with a table -part furniture, part wolf - at which a featureless naked lady sits nonchalantly as if calmly waiting for a meal to be served. Her hair curls up and forms a bird with a swan-like neck which viciously confronts the wolf's head growing out of the table. His tale and genitals are at the other end.
Brauner produced a series of paintings such as this, inhabited by strange hybrids of women, animals and objects. These absurd, hallucinatory fantasies spring from the enigmatic world of Surrealist art, in which the visual imagination is freed from the constraints of reason and logic. The Surrealists vision aimed to harness the unconscious to produce revelatory, stimulating images.
THE JANCO DADA MUSEUM AND EIN HOD ARTISTS’S VILLAGE - Israel
Marcel Janco, a renown painter and founder of the Dadaist movement (anti-artists), is seen as one of the most important artists of Jewish - Romanian origin, and he currently belongs to the cultural and artistic heritage of both Romania and Israel. Marcel Janco, born in Bucharest in 1895, had joined a group of artists at the Café Voltaire in Zurich, Switzerland in 1916, and was among the principal founders of the Dada Movement. Dada was a unique artistic movement which had a major impact on 20th century art. It was established in Cabaret Voltaire, in Zurich, Switzerland, by a group of exiled poets, painters and philosophers who were opposed to war, aggression and the changing world culture. Among the founders were Marcel Janco, Hugo Ball, Emmy Hennings, Hans Arp, Richard Huelsenbeck, and, another compatriot of Jewish origin, Tristan Tzara. Dada soirées featured spontaneous poetry, avant-garde music, and mask wearing dancers in elaborate shows. The Dadaists teased and enraged the audience through their bold defiance of Western culture and art, which they considered obsolete in view of the destruction and carnage of World War I. The Dadaists objected to the aesthetics of Western contemporary painting, sculpture, language, literature and music. The group published articles and periodicals, and mounted exhibitions. The seeds sown in Zurich spread throughout the world, resulting in new Dada organizations in Paris, New York, Berlin, Hannover, and more.
Marcel Janco
Janco designed masks and costumes for the famous Dada balls, and created abstract relieves in cardboard and plaster. He had an eclectic style in which he brilliantly combined abstract and figurative elements, expressionistic in nature.
In 1922, Marcel Janco returned to his native Romania, where he made his mark as a painter, theoretician and architect. In 1941, he moved to the land, which was to become the nation of Israel in 1948. It was here that Janco was founded the New Horizons Group. In Israel, Janco painted idyllic watercolor and oil depictions of Safed and Tiberias and was captivated by the exotic sights of the Orient.
In 1953, on the ruins of an abandoned Arab village, Marcel Janco established the artists’ village known as Ein Hod, which now boasts the The Janco Dada Museum. Ein Hod is a picturesque artists’ village, the only one of its kind in Israel and one of the few such villages in the world. Nestled in natural vegetation and bordered by an ancient olive grove, it lies on the western slopes of Mt. Carmel, in a breathtaking landscape looking out toward the sea and the Crusader fortress of Atlit. Nowadays, Ein Hod is a unique and romantic retreat where painters, sculptors, ceramists, actors and many other artists form every artistic fields, live and create. Throughout the years, ten of Ein Hod’s artists have won the Israel Prize.
In 1967, Marcel Janco was awarded the Israel Prize for Painting. In the last years of his life he worked together with his friends to erect the Janco Dada Museum. Janco died ten months after the inauguration of the museum in 1984.
The Janco Dada Museum is situated in the center of the Ein Hod Artists’s Village, twenty km South of Haifa. The museum contains several display galleries. The permanent display is dedicated to Marcel Janco’s seventy years of artistic creation, the entrance gallery is available for young artists and special projects, and the lower gallery exhibits contemporary art.
The museum also features a youth wing and a DADALAB, a unique art laboratory.
ARMENIAN ARTIST ONIK SAHAKIAN
by Gayane Abrahamyan
Excerpt from the article published in
“Armenia Now” that covered Sahakian’s exhibition in his motherland, at the at the Gevorgyan Gallery, Yerevan
Salvador Dali & Onik Sahakian
The world's most famous surrealist once called Iranian-Armenian artist Onik Sahakian the Daliest man I know. (…) Sahakian has had 52 solo exhibitions, in such places as the Museum of World Culture at Gotheborg, the Grand Palais in Paris, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow, and the Contemporary Art Museum in Tehran, his home.
`I have a strange feeling. I have always identified myself as an American, and only here, in Armenia, I understood I belong to this land, as if I have lived especially here in my past life,' Sahakian told ArmeniaNow.
His has been a life immersed in art, starting from age seven, when he became acquainted with Indian dance, and began staging his own performances. He later studied at the Yelena Avetisian School of Choreography, while also studying painting (Persian miniatures) at the Tehran Institute of Fine Arts.
In 1956, and by then a skilled ballet dancer, Sahakian moved to the United States, where he appeared in more than 100 dance performances over 10 years.
In 1958, he met Dali. Sahakian's nephew was a hairdresser to Iranian Queen Farah, and to another famous client . . . The nephew introduced Sahakian to a certain client who fancied having enormous rollers in his hair, Salvador Dali. That day was the beginning of a unique friendship that was to last 20 years. `The Spaniard cast a spell upon me so that I began painting again,' Sahakian says. `A moment came when painting became my way of self-expression. A dancer's life is as short as that of a butterfly. Art is a means of self- expression to me. After dance, painting became the world where I become candid and express myself.'
Over the years Sahakian assisted Dali with his collages, paintings and sculptures. He also designed exquisite jewelry for Dali and his wife. Then he moved to New York City, where he set up a consulting agency for art and jewelry design, known as `Onik Design Ltd'. (He now lives in New York and Lisbon.) Dali also once told Sahakian: `You are crazy; but a good kind of crazy'. The super surrealist's `crazy' friend says his life has been one of a constant search for meaning. His search through art took him from miniatures to Dutch classics into impressionism.
Of course he could not escape the influence of the powerful surrealist, but Sahakian soon found his own style and means of expression. `My works are mystical and lyrical, Dali's are aggressive and shocking, if critics compare us, they must have never known him,' says Sahakian. `I do not aim at shocking people with my art. Life is cruel by itself; on the contrary art should embrace people's hearts with quietness and harmony.'
In his book `Prodigy' Explanation' , art critic Ghoncheh Tazmini writes that Sahakian `infuses in the disjuncture of the surrealist imagination elements of hope, faith and comfort. Onik's talent lies in his ability to reconcile two disparate orientations bringing to his audience a sense of harmony and equilibrium.'
The painter's series of faceless Madonnas puts the revered figure in gorgeous garments with an empty oval instead of the face that allows people, the artist says, to feel the spiritual essence, to ascend from the material and the body and see not beautiful eyes, nose or mouth, but an unearthly spirit.
`And who knows how Madonna's or Christ's faces looked? For every man the face of the Lord is inside himself, within the limits of his conscience,' says the artist. Stairs are also a frequently repeating theme in Sahakian's paintings - Place of Silence, Enigma. Stairs going up to the endless sky symbolize each step of the man, every single kind thing done that step by step lead to cosmic eternity and quietness. `In arts, and especially in painting, the most important thing is the positive energy the art should express,' Sahakian says. `I get hundreds of letters from different people mostly saying their souls calm down in front of my paintings. I think this is a big achievement.”
By Bianca Andreea Marin
Somebody wrote to me, in 2004: “I went out last night with several friends. They talked a lot about love; each of them gave his or her opinions on this matter. I was the only one who kept quiet, with a tear trying to escape at the corner of my eye. It was clear, by the relaxed way in which everybody was talking and my impotence to utter one word, that I was the only one who loved somebody. I left them there and went out to get some air, to understand what cannot be understood, the heaviness on my chest, the melancholy that I don’t know where it has come from...”
I have been trying for weeks to write this chronicle about the show “Dorian Gray” and have always failed, without knowing why. I couldn’t seem to find any suitable words. In front of true art, just as in front of true love, one should remain silent.
The same friend passionately believes there can be no art without love. One can be a dancer, a painter, a writer, but without a true emotion inside one’s chest, without that burning fire, one can never be an artist.
That is why there are so few artists in the world. There are many writers, dancers, painters, sculptors, but how many, among all of them, are artists? An artist is a creator. This is the most accurate definition. How can someone create something without a genuine feeling of love?
It is easy to recognise a man in love just as it is easy to know when you are in front of a true artist. You feel it. Without any reasons, without any explanations, you simply know you are in the presence of something divine, as art is, after all, together with love, the quickest way in which a Man becomes a God.
I met an art critic in Madrid who said she gave up writing about contemporary painting because nothing could impress her anymore. There is a general feeling that so much has been done in art. That all true art has already been created. And suddenly, out of the blue, somebody appears and changes all your previous perceptions and convictions. Pouring fresh blood on the altar-stage of the theatre, the dancer Razvan Mazilu can change your world in seconds. We, the audience, experience side by side with him, the painful birth, the joys and sorrows of life, the excruciating death and the luminous resurrection of ART itself. With each new show, he re-invents ART. Is it dance? Is it theatre? Is it painting? Ballet? All words are poor. Language has been kneeled down. Words have become useless. A new language has been born, the language of motion and emotion, of colour and music. It is not a dance; it is life itself, the dance of the creation of mankind. Deep in your heart you feel, you know, that he is an Artist. Love is pouring down through him, out of him, with every drop of sweat, and I wouldn’t be surprised if his sweat, at the end of the show, were blood, not water.
The transfiguration of Man into the Divine. That is what attracts us to art, what leaves us bewildered and what seeds turmoil in our hearts.
I could go on saying how beautifully this man dances, how versatile he is, how perfect his moves are. This all has been said before.
I don’t go to see Razvan Mazilu’s shows to see a dancer. Not even to see the greatest dancer. I don’t go there to see a theatre – dance, a fantastic never-before-seen choreographic show. I go there to experience the transfiguration of the Human into the Divine. I see a Man, walking barefoot on an empty stage, just as walking onto an altar. He is both the priest and the sacrificed. Each move makes him sweat blood. Each move elevates him. He twirls, he falls down, he rises. The more he moves, the more he glows, as it is the very move that nourishes him just as the living water in our fairytales refreshed the power of the beautiful princes who struggled with the dark forces. He, too, struggles. He puts up a fierce fight against his own humanity. He rips his flesh out while we hold our breath, throwing away his sweaty, bloody, exhausted Human skin. The sacrifice is complete, the dance is over. The music stops. The figure who stands up in the midst of the howling ovations and the frenetic clapping audience is not a man anymore. He has gone to the other side as a Man and as a Dancer and has come back a God and an Artist. The divine Eucharisty of Art makes us all whole again, and puts a bit of hope in our souls. He has broken his body and gives it back to us in thousands of energetic particles. He has been through the torture of the artistic transformation and has crucified himself on its axes, dying on stage for us all. Behold, he has risen in front of our eyes so that we may not lose the path. The path of true emotion, of art and love.
If you ask me about the dance of Razvan Mazilu, I can only remain quiet, with a tear trying to escape at the corner of my eye.
All the rest is, as the Ecclesiastes said:“Vanity of vanities”. Among all the mist and the vapour, the portrait of the true artist will never perish.
Photo by Mihaela Marin
EUSTATIU STOENESCU AND PANAIT ISTRATI
Endowed with exceptional qualities and moreover having received a remarkable education, Eustatiu Stoenescu created an oeuvre, which focused attention on him n three continents: Europe, North America an Asia. Thus, his participation in the great exhibitions of the time or his one-man shows in Paris, Venice, New York, London, Rome, Geneva, Bucharest etc. brought him the unanimous appreciation of experts, critics, the press and the art collectors. Numerous prizes, special honours as well as the purchase of his paintings for great museums and private collections from France, Italy, the USA, Great Britain, Belgium, and Holland etc. established him internationally. He was born in 1884, in Craiova, Romania and he died in 1957 in New York.
A painter about whom one can doubtlessly state that he created his own style, Eustatiu Stoenesculent to his work homogeneousness, force and character, without ever trying to demonstrate his capacity to innovate, succeeded in achieving and asserting his originality.
As unanimously known, Stoenescu was a great portraitist. In Romania, as well as abroad, he was acknowledged as the artist who made the portraits of different officials, state leaders, members of the aristocracy, of wealthy intellectuals, of fashionable, distinguished
ladies. He made them quickly, without endless sessions. He was a virtuoso, a magician of the brush. When referring to Stoenescu´s talent, Theodor Pallady once said rather maliciously that .unfortunately he has too much of it.., while on another occasion, he said that .when you have got talent, you do what you want, when you have genius, you do want you can..
Stoenescu´s portraits compel recognition, in terms of consummate execution, offhanded touch and spontaneous inspiration. Attentive to psychological details, the painter proved capable to transcribe reality faithfully, to select the essential and subordinate colouristic effects to expressiveness. Painted in a wide range of styles, with an extraordinary verve, his portraits illustrate the talent of a gifted artist, to capture, with no hesitation, and to define clearly the universe of a human face as well as to concentrate, into a single image, the history of a lifetime.. (Paul Rezeanu, Eustatiu Soenescu, Bucharest, 1998)
Such is the portrait of the great Romanian writer Panait Istrati, painted in a nervous, a robust drawing, a parsimonious colour range in which he managed more than ever to reveal the secrets of the latter's soul, through a keen sense of observation.
Panait Istrati (1884.1935) was nicknamed The Maxim Gorky of the Balkans. He was the son of a Greek smuggler and a Romanian peasant woman and grew up among peasants, fishermen, sailors and vagabonds in Galatz, Romania, (near the Danube Delta). He became himself a harmless vagabond, worked and bummed his way all around the Mediterranean including the Middle East and wrote in the meantime enchanting short stories and novels in his beautiful self-taught French language about the people he knew: Romanians, Greeks, Arabs, Jews, etc. A fellow traveller for a while, Istrati visited the USSR in the 1920s together with his (later
Nobel Prize winner) friend Nikos Kazantsakis. Istrati left the USSR completely disillusioned and wrote a book about it. His writing success began when he wrote to the French writer he admired most, Romain Rolland, with whom he had tried to get in touch for long. Rolland immediately replied to this letter. In 1923 Istrati’s story Kyra Kyralina was published (with a preface by Rolland). It became the first in his
Adrien Zograffi literary cycle. Rolland was fascinated with Istrati’s adventurous life, urging him to write more and publishing part of his works in the magazine he and Henri Barbusse owned, Clarté. The next major work by Istrati was Codine.
Romain Rolland considered him a wonderful storyteller and ever since, Istrati has been on the list of popular French classics. He belongs both to Romanian and French literary universes. He is one the most translated Romanian writers in all major languages.
"A survey of 500 British artists, curators, critics and art dealers asked each to name the world's most influential piece of modern art."
Brancusi's "Endless Column" was among the top ten.
Consider, too, his famed "Column of the Infinite" or "Endless Column" created to memorialize Romanian soldiers who died in World War I. The column stands in Targiu Jiu, a southern town in the Wallachian region. While various explanations are offered for the symmetrical form chosen, a plausible one from ancient times is the use of two triangles forming an hour-glass shape. One part symbolizes birth to maturity; the other maturity to death. Repeating the sequence, as Brancusi did, depicts the infinite cycle of life. The symbol is widely seen in artifacts recovered from sites along the Danube (but was also widely used in other regions of the world).
Sorel Etrog
Renowned sculptor, painter, writer and philosopher Sorel Etrog was born in 1933 in Iasi, Romania. In 1950 he left his native Romania for Israel where he studied at the Tel Aviv Art Institute. His first solo exhibition was in Tel Aviv in 1958, after which he was awarded a scholarship to study at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York. In 1959, he had his first Canadian solo exhibition at Gallery Moos in Toronto. Leaving New York for Toronto in 1963, Etrog became a Canadian Citizen and in 1966 represented Canada at the Venice Biennale.
Since the late 1950s until the present, Sorel Etrog's work has been exhibited extensively in one-person exhibitions in Canada and internationally including Gallery Moos, Toronto; the Dominion Gallery, Montreal; Dunkelman Gallery, Toronto; Evelyn Aimis Gallery, Toronto; Marlborough Godard Gallery, Toronto; Buschlen Mowatt Gallery, Vancouver; Rose Fried Gallery, New York; Martha Jackson Gallery, New York; Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York; Marlborough Gallery, New York; Valley House Gallery, Dallas; Hokin Gallery, Palm Beach; Felix Landau Gallery, Los Angeles; Palazzo Strozzi, Florence; Schneider Gallery, Rome; Springer Gallery, Berlin; Hanover Gallery, London; Naviglio Gallery, Milan; Galerie d'Eendt, Amsterdam; Centre Culturel Canadien, Paris; and the Singapore Art Museum, Singapore. His work has been included in group exhibitions at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; the Carnegie International, Pittsburgh; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Palazzo Vecchio, Florence; Musée des Beaux-Arts, Le Havre; Musée Rodin, Paris; Kuntsmuseum, Basel; and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, amongst others.
Etrog's work is represented in the major capitals of the world and is included in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C.; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Storm King Art Center, Mountainville, New York; the University of California, Los Angeles; Kunstmuseum, Basel; Kroller-Muller Museum, Otterlo, Holland; Musée d'Arte Moderne, Paris; Museo Internazionale d'Arte Contemporano, Florence; the Tate Gallery, London, amongst many others. Etrog has received several important commissions, including those for Expo '67, Montreal; SunLife Centre, Toronto; Windsor Sculpture Garden, Windsor, Ontario; Los Angeles County Museum, and Olympic Park in Seoul, Korea. He designed the Canadian Film Award in 1968, originally called the "Etrog," later renamed the "Genie."
Sorel Etrog is also well known for his writings and published plays, poetry and non-fiction. Of his many collaborations, the most acclaimed are his book illustrations for Eugene Ionesco and Samuel Beckett in the late 1960s. Sorel Etrog and Marshall McLuhan collaborated on the publication Spiral which was drawn from Etrog's film of the same title which was broadcast on CBC television in 1975.
Numerous reviews, articles, monographs and catalogue texts have been written about Etrog's work.
Sorel Etrog was appointed Member of the Order of Canada in 1994 and was
made a Chevalier of Arts and Letters by the Government of France in 1996.
He describes his art as "tension created by pulling together and pulling apart, with being stuck and being freed, a world of grabbing and holding on and losing hold….bringing shapes together but at the same time giving each an independence."
Onik Sahakian and Romeo Niram
Eva Defeses
In the article “Brancusi E=mc2” – Painting Exhibition at Mac, Lisbon, published in the previous issue of Niram Art Magazine, I underlined Romeo Niram’s attempt to link two different visions, one in the scientific field, of Albert Einstein and the other in the artistic one, of Constantin Brancusi: “This exhibition is dedicated to the encounter that has never taken place in the real world between the physicist Albert Einstein and the sculptor Constantin Brancusi, an encounter that may have taken place in the world of the creative ideas. Romeo Niram tries to find common points, to establish clear relations between science and art, showing how the human mind can reach, by way of unknown and unexplainable mechanisms, scientifically or artistically, the same genial intuition that can determine the progress of Humanity. Brancusi’s sculpture, Einstein’s physics, art and science are brought together on Niram’s canvas, raising even more questions. (…)”
The words “the human mind can reach, by way of unknown and unexplainable mechanisms, scientifically or artistically, the same intuition (…)” came directly to mind when I saw the year mentioned underneath a photo of the painting “The Vision of Albert Einstein” by Onik Sahakian – the year 2007. It is not surprising that two painters coincided on their mutual fascination about the figure of the great physicist and they both portrayed them in their work, but it is at least intriguing that they were both captured by the same inspiration in the same year. In 2007, while Sahakian was painting his “Vision of Albert Einstein”, Romeo Niram created the series of paintings “Brancusi E=mc2”, in which the portrait of Albert Einstein appears several times. It should be mentioned that the two painters weren’t acquainted with each other at that time, having thus no idea that, at exactly the same time, another painter was painting exactly the same thing – Einstein’s portrait.
Attracted by this coincidence, I began to study the work of Onik Sahakian and realized that they did not coincide only on one painting. At a closer view, there are several important elements in their art that periodically reappear: stairs, clocks, flowers, floors, walls, chessboards, etc.
I tried to venture inside their art disregarding the most important element that binds them together and I failed. Between their two art forms, I had to recognize the overwhelming shadow of Salvador Dali.
In the case of Onik Sahakian, the presence of Salvador Dali is more than obvious, even at a personal level. He met Dali in 1950 and they were united in a friendship that lasted for 20 years and culminated in Sahakian’s return to painting, at Dali’s advice. We can see throughout his work a constant reference to Dali although from a different point of view, as Sahakian himself states that his works are “poetical and mystical”.
The early works of Romeo Niram also present many surrealist elements, as well as sketches after Dali`s paintings. Niram later learned to disguise his surrealistic appetite, without ever renouncing at it. Stubbornly believing that Salvador Dali is the greatest painter of all times, Romeo Niram has always been fascinated with the art and life of the Spanish painter, describing for instance his passage through the Academy of Fine Arts of Bucharest with the Dalinian words: “I was the best in the art school. But not because I was very good, but because everybody else was very bad.” It is not surprising then, that we can find many similarities with Dali’s art in his paintings, like his dedication to technical virtuosity and the taste for creating complex, detailed, thoroughly studied even at the smallest level, artworks.
Of course this statement is puzzling. Wasn´t Surrealism the artistic movement that was trying to free art from the control of reason and that underlined the importance of what they called “automatism” – writing and drawing without any conscious control? Attempting to answer this dilemma, the art critic Christopher Masters in the book “Dali” states that “Dali himself had little sympathy with automatism and always composed his paintings with great deliberation. Nonetheless, the imaginative power of his imagery was so great that by 1929, the Surrealist leader Andre Breton admitted:” It is perhaps with Dali that for the first time the windows of the mind are opened fully wide”.
An important element in both Niram and Sahakian’s art is their interest in science, particularly physics, as demonstrated by the works mentioned above, the portraits of Albert Einstein. Once more, the figure of Dali rises between their paintings, having been the first in uniting art and physics, according to the scientific discoveries of his time. “For Dali, the development of nuclear physics exerted a profound metaphysical importance (…). In “The First Sudy for the Madonna of Port Lligat”, the image of the Virgin and Child is split into several sections in order to create a rather superficial metaphor for the divisibility of matter. (…) In “Exploding Raphaelesque Head”, the image is constructed out of smaller forms as metaphor for the structure of matter and antimatter.” (Christopher Masters). Dali`s obsession with time, or the dissolution of time as seen from his dissolving clocks, is also deeply rooted in the revolution that Albert Einstein started and that made mankind’s perception of time explode. Einstein`s relativity of time and Dali`s dissolving clocks annunciate the creation of a new love affair, between science and art, continued nowadays on the canvas of Romeo Niram and Onik Sahakian.
This short introduction into several directions of Dali’s work is meant to create the mirror in which the works of both Niram and Sahakian reflect themselves, a mirror that captures the images and transforms them, to later render them back to our eyes, in a more comprehensible way.
We begin our journey into the art of Onik Sahakian and Romeo Niram not on a chronological level, but on an artistic one, trying to identify potential common elements and sources of inspiration. We don´t have to travel very far away, Sahakian’s “Vision of India”, apart from its very Dalinian influence presents a feminine nude in a reclined position (similar with Gala´s nude in “Slave Market with the Disappearing Bust of Voltaire” – 1940) on a floor resembling a chessboard. The chess pattern can be compared to the one appearing in Niram’s “Symbiosis II”, while he also chooses the same Dalinian painting for his untitled sketch of 2003.
Niram’s “Symbiosis” and Sahakian’s “Metamorphosis” and “Birth of Aphrodite” combine the same elements in a different artistic vision: plants and flowers embracing feminine nudes, mural background, the combination of vegetal and human elements, more obvious at Sahakian, allusive at Niram. In “Symbiosis I”, the roses duo in the left part of the paintings fluctuate their vegetal bodies in the exact same way of the feminine figures at the right - just as Sahakian´s Aphrodite`s is covered on the left side of her body with floral branches. The blue element is also present although in an upside down manner, sky at Onik, water at Niram. At Onik, most of his paintings contain a lineal element, parts of a simplified wooden floor or parts of a wall. At Niram, this background element is also present, but is disposed on the vertical, in the shape of gigantic walls of labyrinthic constructions that aim for the sky.
The same verticality is experienced on the upper level of Sahakian’s paintings, as seen from his ascending Madonnas or the great amount of space dedicated to the sky. Sahakian´s works appear to have clear separations between the vertical and the horizontal which render them serenity and peacefulness, whereas Niram proposes a more entangled atmosphere, where the limits are not defined, horizontal elements rise up, while the sky is turned into water, labyrinthic and monolithic buildings dominate the space in a continuous inversion of what we may expect; all these elements generate tension and transmit nervousness. The poetic flow of Sahakian’s paintings is not present at Niram, who creates convulsive atmospheres and even when he tries to paint more peaceful scenes, the turbulent element is always present. A definite surrealistic touch of Niram’s “Symbiosis” series is the painter’s own confession that he painted these images based on a dream that he recurrently had at nighttime.
The same verticality and ascending motion is better seen in Sahakian’s works “Adoration of the Holy Spirit” and “Enigma” and in Niram`s drawing “Apocalypse”. The religious motif, the ascending images and the staircase that loses its way in the distance are strong elements that demonstrate this intriguing similitude that lies beneath the external, different aspect of their art.
The Portuguese heritage is another element that the two of them share, both on a personal and on a creative level, Niram lived in Portugal for a brief period and Sahakian still lives there nowadays. Niram’s series of paintings “Essay of Lucidity” is centered on culture figures of the Portuguese environment while Sahakian chooses a more geographical approach in his vision of the caravels in the works “Christopher Columbus” from 1997, which renders tribute, although depicting Columbus, to the Portuguese Discoveries and in “Vision of India”, the Portuguese being the first Europeans that landed there.
In 1996, Sahakian chooses a curious background for the “Birth of Adam and Eve” – an ovoid shape. Thus, the beginning of mankind according to Sahakian started with a primordial egg inside which Adam and Eve are portrayed embracing one another, their bodies still united into one physical being. In 2007, Niram also painted a “Beginning of the World”, the centre of his painting being also an ovoid – Brancusi`s sculpture that also bears the same name. On the left and right of the ovoid – the portraits of Einstein and Brancusi. Niram proposes a new interpretation of Brancusi´s sculpture by means of the science, or of the physics by means of the art. “The Beginning of the World”, the famous egg-shaped sculpture of Brancusi had been created before the scientific community decided the shape of the Universe to be quasi-spherical and Einstein’s formula E=mc2 proved to be, after his death, the Formula of the Creation of the Universe. Sahakian’s “Birth” of mankind (Adam and Eve) and Brancusi’s “Beginning and the World” are unified and explained by this painting of Romeo Niram, in which Einstein’s portrait is linked to Brancusi’s ovoid, clearly offering a scientific explanation on the obsession with the ovoid shape – the shape of the universe.
Sahakian’s work “Picture in an Exhibition” from 2004 explore this connection between art and physics deeper, not only by the dominating presence of the clock – the time counter, but by illustrating the physics principle of the light. At first glance, we tend to think that the silhouette of the man that is coming towards us reading an exhibition flyer is doubled in the mirror by the silhouette of the same man seen from the back, fading out in the distance. If it weren’t for the trace that recreates the first man`s journey and makes a turn towards the disappearing man, we wouldn’t have thought of a more scientific explanation. But the lingering trace tells a more complex story and Sahakian’s interest in physics offers the clarification: if one man travels on a road holding a lantern in his hand and illuminating his way, the beam of light from the lantern in front of him always travels on a circular trajectory and always returns to him in the back, having described a full circle around the Earth.
Three years later, Sahakian returned to his scientific preoccupation in his work “Vision of Albert Einstein”, carefully commented upon by Mario Barangea in the article “Reasons of the End of the World”. Although I also embrace the line that he follows when explaining the similarities between Niram and Sahakian´s visions of Einstein, I have to disagree with several of his views. The lined floor that stretches to the horizon in Sahakian’s painting cannot be interpreted as a “a symbol of a parental home”. It is a very important element that appears in most of Sahakian’s works and I believe it means more than the comfort of a familiar wooden floor and is also present in Niram’s “Essay on Dostoievsky”. The wooden structure similar to that of a floor is indeed a “real” element of our environment, of all our houses, but its sublimation to mere lines that reach the horizon speak of a larger view. The painter loses all specific elements that hold him or his art captive within a definite space and reaches forward, stretches his vision unto the whole world, and beyond; the Earth with its imaginary geometrical longitudinal and latitudinal lines is the perfect pedestal Sahakian´s figures. Furthermore, the art critic sees in the white flags that surround and divide Einstein’s face “the desire for peace and for reconciliation of the artist with the visible world”. Indeed, Sahakian’s paintings offer his viewers a feeling of serenity and peace, but although Einstein himself was a well-known peace advocate, the scientific revolution that he started is hardly peaceful. My own interpretation of the flags is a bit more aggressive, they remind me of the flags implanted in the heart of a conquered citadel after a fierce battle or on a newly discovered land, after a exhausting geographical expedition – they are the victorious flags that Albert Einstein vigorously implanted on the soil of a newly conquered territory of science. By comparing Einstein to an apostle of “new skies and territory” Barangea gets closer to my own interpretation and also magnificently shifts towards Niram`s vision of Einstein as the new Moses of mankind, depicted with the newly discovered Tablets of the New Torah – the Formula of the Creation of the Universe, E=mc2 in several paintings.
I would like to linger a bit more on this vision of Albert Einstein as an apostle, or better said, a Messiah of the Contemporary world that both Sahakian and Niram share. One of the attributes of such a religious leader is his capacity for breaking down an old order and revolutionary creating a new one, governed by new laws, rejected at first, and later embraced by all his followers. Moses revolutionized the Hebrew society by freeing them from slavery and offering the Moral Code of the Torah – which means “law” in Hebrew – creating a totally new world for them. Jesus turned upside down all our inherited notions of Good and Evil and offered mankind a new vision of morality governed by the Law of Absolute Love. Until Albert Einstein, humanity had strong beliefs on time and space, stable concepts that were the foundation of our world. Einstein turns upside down all our previous perceptions and theories of time and space, offering the bewildered mankind the absurd, revolutionary idea of the relativity of space and time – his Theory of Relativity.
United in their art by the same artistic and philosophical quests, Romeo Niram and Onik Sahakian are artists of the new millennium, not the chronological one, but the visionary new era, who have understood that not only Science can determine the Progress of Humanity. Art, by virtue of the powerful and visionary forces of intuition of its creators, can also become a tool of investigation. Separated by time and space but united by their epiphanies, like particles of the same beam of light that, although on separate trajectories, mysteriously experience the same physical changes, Brancusi, Dali, Sahakian and Niram are only a few of the artists whose Art is an exploration of the Universe on an artistic and scientific level.
Rodica Toth Poiata
by Bianca A. Marin
The paintings of Rodica Toth Poiata may be regarded as the pictorial embodiment of John Keats’ verses : “A thing of beauty is a joy for ever / Its loveliness increases; it will never / Pass into nothingness; but still will keep / A bower quiet for us, and a sleep / Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.”
Indeed, we are invited into a dreamy universe, suspended somewhere in that perfect place between reality and sleep. Transfigured figures pass in front of our hypnotised eyes, in a trance, dancing in circles, illuminating the darkness, subjugating the senses. The feminine bodies are soaked in the deepest eroticism, yet remain pure. It is precisely this mixture of eroticism and purity, of the carnal and the spiritual that bewilders the viewer. A realm of our deepest fantasies opens for us in each of her paintings. There is no darkness, yet the presence of the night is everywhere. In the midst of all the sweet shades of light which embrace the women, there lies the night. For these images can only exist in a dream.
Born in Brasov, Romania in 1950, Rodica Toth Poiata is a singular artist. She has held many exhibitions in Romania and abroad (Greece, France, Denmark). Her delicate works have attracted the eyes of the art lovers, yet they have never lost that touch of mystery which makes them unique.
In an interview in the Romanian newspaper “Cotidianul” she confesses: “For example in the painting called Aura,” (as well as in several other paintings) “I wanted to represent a character between the waking state and sleep, between dream and reality, between the unexplainable and the concrete.” The painting shows a graceful feminine figure, lying in the bed, surrounded by a mysterious fluid which carries her into another world. “There is nothing provocative, but calmness, serenity, it is the attitude of a person who does not know that she is being watched, she does not assume a pose. In order to situate the figure in reality I introduced a real element, the rectangular shapes on the bed.” The artist admits this is a very dear painting to her and confesses she has to part with sorrow from many of her paintings. And of course, there are a few that she will never give away. She never uses models because “a model would catch my spirit by her beauty and would compel me not to lose a single detail, but in this case my art would merely be a copy of the reality. Therefore I seek to make visible in my paintings not the persons but the feelings that they have conveyed to me.”
“In the beginning, the artistic preoccupations have made me face the attempt to express the beauty of the surrounding reality. After that, I tried to paint in order to show to those around me the way the artist in me sees the reality. Now I paint in a continuous dialogue with the viewer, in a sort of telepathic communication and I am happy because we both feel in the same way, we both vibrate at the same Beauty.”
With its radiant silhouettes and enchanted eroticism, Rodica Toth Poiata´s works show us the magical beauty of Painting.
the Hebrew Language
by Eva Defeses
In eternal remembrance of
Anna, disappeared at Treblinka, 1943
I tried to find you in my dreams
Being only an adventurer at the beginning of my journey into this world of mysteries that is the Hebrew Language, I will not try to give any explicit information on its history, development and grammatical singularities. All this is available in professional terms in many books and freely on the Internet and I would only copy the words of the specialists.
I will neither speak about the hidden “information” – numerology and the Kabalah. The Bible’s code – in Hebrew, of course - is another example of the obsession that the study of this language may generate. For this, you can also use Google or the Discovery extensive documentaries on it. I have never been attracted by numbers, only by words and sounds.
We all speak of ART, Literature being one of the known forms of art (I say “Known” because the future may reserve us many discoveries in the artistic field, too), Music another one. Between the Word and the Sound, there stands the Image – the “fine arts” of painting, sculpture, photography and so on. Man has always tried to put his thoughts and feelings in images and sounds since the early days of the cave drawings and rudimentary musical instruments.
But we often forget the primordial form of art, sadly seen today only as a speech mechanism, a tool of communication, something less artistic because of its utility. Isn’t language a form of Art? Today, there are thousands of languages in the world, ancient or more recent, each and one of them beautiful and exciting.
Let’s take Romanian, for instance, the proud descendent of Latin. Let’s not pay any attention to its complex grammar neither to its never-ending synonymic rows. Just listen to the flow of the language, at night, to a recited poem perhaps. The melody, the arid impact and trepid stop of the words speak of its Mother Latin. Phonetically, when listened carefully, Romanian loses its Slavic sweetness or its Italian-style operatic melody and drapes itself in the austere cloak of the grave, imposing Latin. When combined with the vivid idiomatic expressions that give Romanian that sarcastic, humoristic personality or the tragic tone of the Romanian mourning chants, the result is Music and Literature combined, the folkloric poems of “Mioritza” and “Master Manole”, with their heart-aching rhythm and dramatic plot being the perfect example of the splendor and power that this language is able to convey.
Each language has gathered throughout the centuries its own artistic treasure, musically and poetically, that now reflects itself on the personality of the people who speak it and on their artistic creation. There is an interesting connection between language - personality - art. We, men, created the language. But can it influence our own creations and personality now?
Greek is another language that attracts our imagination, mostly because of its ancient philosophy and literature. But the Greek language is, even in the contemporary form, pure Art. The music of the Greek language is one of Humanity’s greatest achievements. Listen to the Orthodox Resurrection Chants in Greek and any other language, for example. Or compare “Hristos anesti –Eleithos anesti” with “Christ has risen. He has truly risen”. After peeling off the first, more “visible” and beautiful aspect of the language – its phonetics or “its music”, we venture deep inside it: the Greek language is a land of metaphors and innuendoes, the word formation mechanism is often based upon an idea, a piece of philosophy, a poetic feeling. By studying Greek, one learns Philosophy without further need for references. It is an intricate language that still holds within it the perceptive way of thinking of its genial ancient speakers, a language that in its Morphology and Syntax holds the code for a new “Dialogue”. But Greek has other unknown qualities, like its tendency for reverie and romanticism for instance, which is impossible to suspect at first glance about the language of the rigorous Orthodox Dogma.
English is one of my favourite languages because it has the unique ability of condensing the essence of a whole phrase into a couple of words and of expressing a meaning in one word better than many other languages in ten. English – from England – still walks in the Romantic beauty of Byron’s poems of “cloudless skies[1]” without losing the intelligent, clear-cut irony of Oscar Wilde.
So many languages, so many ways of making music, so many “living”, every-day poetry…Uncovering the secrets of a language is a voyage deep into the ancestral soul of its people and learning about the history and personality of its speakers right from its pulsating heart. But there are languages that even today remain an unbreakable puzzle, like Euskera[2], the language of the Basques from Euskadi[3], whose ancient origin loses itself in the past, a unique language that bears resembles to no other on the whole Earth and cannot be categorized by the specialists.
Amidst all the languages of Mankind, there is one that stands alone. Shy, like a veiled virgin of fairytales, the Hebrew language does not like to show off. Although, “she” has written the most important Book of all times and although many of us, Christians and Jews alike believe it to be the language chosen by God to speak to us mortals, or that is the language of the Son of God Himself, the Hebrew language has remained a hidden treasure, the locked garden of Shir HaShirim[4], the beautiful bride whose beauty must remain under closed doors. It is the never-ending love story between God and Man, the primordial Kiddushin[5]…
Hebrew is a language of infinite sadness; its music is a desperate prayer, an incessant Psalm. It is the remembrance of the tragic cry of Adam when he lost his Paradise. The mourning for Eden is touchable in each Hebrew word. Like a painting of a sad Angel, his wings broken down, Hebrew is faithful only to its prophets who cried to the Lord in the desert.
Maybe it is the only language “infinite” in interpretations and meanings. Trying to learn Hebrew is losing oneself in an ocean of mysteries, where nothing is certain, everything changes by virtue of occult forces. It is a language that refuses to be learned, a moving territory of semantic sands where Fata Morgana reigns. She gives you the illusion that you have learned a word, that its meaning is certain and there can be no confusions. The victory is short-lived, the meaning changes, fluctuates, refuses to be embraced by your eager memory. The grammar rules are created only to be broken, to confuse you. There are more exceptions than words that obey the rules. Nothing is what it seems to be. It is not a game, there is nothing playful about this language, Hebrew does not play hide-and-seek with you. “She” simply refuses you. “She” escapes, with all her mysteries, leaving you with the sad, bitter taste of a love that could not be, of a beautiful woman that could not be kissed, the enchanting trace of her perfume still lingering behind her. Enraged, you extend your arms, trying to capture her, she runs away, sending you only a tragic glance with her dark, beautiful eyes. You are left alone, her scent all around you, the sound of her silver bracelets still tinkling far-away…a glimpse of what could have been and was not, like the final “h” in many Hebrew words, silent but present, impossible to pronounce but hauntingly beautiful, the sad whisper that lingers on, after one has pronounced a word. A native Hebrew speaker, trying to explain the mystery of this sound, told me once that it is like a “delicate sigh that loses its echo in the distance”.
Sadness is perhaps the most difficult feeling to understand. You can conquer rage, fury, you can play with indisposition and with bitterness until they turn sweet but you can never conquer sorrow. And perhaps nothing touches us, humans, more than sadness. A sad film, a sad painting, a sad photography can bring tears into our eyes in a second. Every act of creation is an act of sadness. Art is not a vibrant triumph, it is a constant reminder of our miserable mortality, of the death of so many great people, great creators. Nothing has remained after them, apart from a piece of a symphony, a scratched painting or a ragged book - their art, just to be appreciated for a split second by other people who will also perish.
Art gives us the illusion of immortality. It is the agonizing effort of the man who refuses to die. Hebrew has not forgotten this, it gathers within it all the laments of its dead-ones, and it refuses to let them go. The constant remembrance of all its beloved who passed away and the eternal struggle against mortality that Hebrew puts up give this language that distinctive dramatic tone. It is the sadness of a language that is conscious of all those who spoke it, who loved one another whispering it, who prayed in its words and are not here anymore. A continuous Kaddish[6], Hebrew fights for us all – so that we should not be forgotten. When we are long gone and buried, we will all be remembered in the aching consonants of its melody. Like a mother, “she” will pray for us all, asking God to release us from our mortal destiny. If one day Man reaches immortality, it will be only due to the constant, desolated prayer of the Hebrew language, the only one that dares harass God, “demanding” our freedom as persistently as Abraham once did for Sodom and Gomorrah.
Proud daughter of Israel, “she” doesn´t lose herself to the passing moment of contemporary intercourse, like American English for instance. It is a language of love and intimacy between a Man and his God, between a husband and his wife, the never-ending mystery that still binds together the primordial khatan and his kallah[7], a realm of private thoughts and feelings meant only to be whispered. Even the word for “love” (“ahavah”) is sad in Hebrew, holding within it the desperation of the parting moment of death. In English, we say “Till death do us apart” at weddings. Hebrew is also aware of the parting moment but it refuses to let go. It is from the scattering pieces of the broken glass that we shall be once more recreated. The lamentation of the Hebrew language that struggles for the immortality of mankind stubbornly and dramatically, trapped alone within its beloved labyrinth of memories, will someday be our salvation.
A definite argument in favour of the mysterious abilities of the Hebrew language is the Spanish novel “Don Quixote” by Cervantes. The pearl of the Spanish language and literature holds within it many treasures for the Hebrew-speaking people.
An erudite Jewish father with a taste for stories and a romantic character used to reward his children with chocolates for each chapter of “Don Quixote” that the little ones read. The intention deserves praise, the result however was not the expected one: the elder son found the box of chocolates in his parents’ room, where he was not allowed and Don Quixote was given a break.
However, this short and true story demonstrates the affinity of the Jewish soul to Don Quixote’s personality. Almost all names of persons and places in the book are alterations of Hebrew words, the author hiding in this way his Jewish origin, in the dark ages of the Spanish Anti-Semitic oppression, but leaving behind him constant hints of his origin. In the light of the Hebrew language, Don Quixote suddenly shines differently and his tragic and obstinate refusal to give up his dream seems more comprehensible, being far most adequate to the unyielding Jewish soul than to the vibrant and “caliente[8]” spirit of the Hispanics more given to quick-ending passions. The Hebrew messages encrypted within Don Quixote not only certify the author’s origin but may also be the key to the correct understanding of the character. Just like the Hebrew language, Don Quixote wouldn’t give up his dreams, his stubborn fight against all the Evil in the world being only a continuation of the essence of the mother-tongue of the author. And what has happened to the disobedient elder son in the story? Just as his father had predicted, he eventually fell in love with Don Quixote, of course.
True only to itself, Hebrew remains an enigma. It is the only language that refuses to name its God. Hiding behind its many faces and meanings, Hebrew knows how to remain silent and let only the soul speak. The invisible forces that attract and disperse its masculine, persistent consonants and its feminine, floating vocals have constructed a language governed by almost scientific rules. The written contraction of the words with illusive vocals and the later expansion of them in pronunciation, this constant tension, is similar to the physical forces that created the Universe. The written words are masculine, almost only consonants, the pronunciation is vocalized, thus feminine and the direction of writing, from right to left, aims specifically at our heart; with each written word, one gets closer to the heart, at least physically speaking. Hebrew wants to teach us again, by the continuous tension and attraction between its strong consonants and its mysterious vocals and by making the heart the final goal of the written existence of the words, the Lesson of Love. Without the feminine vocals (that have just a hint of visibility in the written form) the words couldn’t be pronounced. The tough, imposing consonants cannot live without the “invisible” vocals. Only the vocals can give life to the masculine written words, or maybe both of them united can give life to each other in a continuous charge and discharge of energy. They cannot exist without one another, only together they can give life to the language. And thus, Hebrew pulls down the veils from the most ancient love-story; we are brought to the dawns of mankind where the first woman was called “Life”, created perhaps when the first man tried to cry out his loneliness with the first word. The constant hide-and-seek between vocals and consonants in Hebrew is the hide-and-seek between man and woman. Hebrew shows us two essential ingredients for a perfect union: the importance of the feminine, mysterious and undisclosed but present and life-giving, and the importance of paying attention to the attraction and distraction forces – creators of that specific amount of tension able to generate never-ending passion. Like the continuous coming and going of the electric circuit, necessary to create the electric sparkle, the contraction and expansion of the consonants and vocals of the Hebrew language teach us how we can make our love eternal. The Physics rules that Hebrew uses are the rules of Love.
As Christians, we are baptized with names of Hebrew origin that make no sense for us and we bear our names throughout all our life unknowing its mystic meanings. Hebrew may help us learn a lot more about ourselves if we have the patience of discovering it. Religiously, it is only in the light of Hebrew that Christian terms like “Amen[9]” or “Alleluia[10]” start to make sense, bringing fresh clearness to our prayers. Language of the Jewish people, Hebrew belongs to all mankind; we are tied to it by invisible chains that only our souls can recognize. Didn’t we all speak Hebrew in Eden?
In the infinite sadness of the Hebrew language we discover ourselves and, slowly, the memory of the Lost Paradise returns to our souls.
If Art is man’s best way to express his feelings and ideas, than the Hebrew language is one of man’s best artworks.
By Raymond Roca
The exploration of identity, a concept central to the human condition and sense of self, has been a theme that has resurfaced repeatedly throughout the history of art, with artists often using their works as a key means of expressing their complex identities to their audiences. After being restrained by the abstractionist, formalist tendencies of modernism, the relationship between art and identity has become increasingly significant during the post-modern era, in a context of growing multiculturalism, post-colonialism, feminism and civil rights. One of the most important ways in which artists have articulated their identities through their works has been self-portraiture, which has enabled the expression of the artist’s personal identity, as well as of collective identities relating to gender, culture and sexual orientation.Three artists whose practice has centred on the expression of identity through self-portraiture are Frida Kahlo, Cindy Sherman and Yasumasa Morimura. Due to changes in their context, however, each of these artists has approached this genre in different ways and has utilised it to focus on different aspects of their identity.
Frida Kahlo, born in 1907, was a Mexican artist who painted mainly from the 1920s until her death in 1954, and is best known for her self-portraits. Her artistic practice was profoundly shaped by a traffic accident in 1925, which left her heavily injured, unable to walk properly and in periods of extreme pain throughout the rest of her life. Although influenced by surrealism, Kahlo refused to categorise her work, instead stating that, “(unlike surrealism), I never paint dreams or nightmares. I paint my own reality.” Indeed, Kahlo’s sixty-six self-portraits can be seen as intense and personal explorations of her post-accident reality, as well as of her complex, multifaceted identity, influenced not only by her accident but also by her heritage and gender
One of the best examples of Kahlo’s self-portraiture is The Broken Column , painted in 1944, which reveals how the artist perceived herself, and hence offers an insight into her personal identity. The painting presents Kahlo’s nude body divided into two by a broken classical column, representing her accident-fractured spine. The compositional centrality of her spine, which is separated from the rest of the body by open flesh, alludes to more than just her spinal injury, instead conveying her personal perception of herself as disabled and fractured, both physically and emotionally. Her mental anguish at her state is also alluded to by the numerous nails which puncture her skin, acting as symbols of her intense pain, as well as the tight leather braces which hold her body together. These braces signify her entrapment as a result of her injury, which rendered her unable to walk for several years, and unable to engage in several social activities. Additionally, the fact that she is surrounded by a barren landscape transmits to the audience her sense of emotional isolation, while also accentuating her own figure in the frame and thus augmenting the importance of her “broken” body to her sense of self. In fact, it is evident from her work, but also from her own admissions, that Kahlo did not see herself as simply injured, but rather as “broken” in a more profound way; she once stated in an interview with Time Magazine that, “I am not sick. I am broken”. Kahlo hence uses The Broken Column to highlight that her disability, and the resulting physical, mental and social consequences of it, in many ways defined her sense of self and her personal identity.
Another work which explores Kahlo’s personal identity is Henry Ford Hospital , which was painted in 1932 and where she confrontingly portrays herself lying on a bed in a pool of blood, after going through her second miscarriage. Described by the American critic John Woodcock as “the frankest work of this famous self-portraitist”, the theme of her disability is again central to the work, considering that her accident gravely reduced her chances of having a child, even though she desperately desired one. Once again, Kahlo depicts herself as isolated, connected only to a foetus which she desires but knows is impossible to possess. In this painting, the artist thus conveys to the audience her concern and preoccupation with her persistent miscarriages, and the contribution this had to her personal identity as a female unable to have a child.
Aside from her intimate personal identity, Kahlo is also well-known for depicting her cultural and gender identity through her self-portraits. According to the critic Richard Dorment, it is this quality of “exploring every aspect of her identity” that has enabled Frida to become “the most important female artist of the 20th century”. The art historian Amie Gillingham also argues this view in her essay Frida Kahlo: Identity /Duality, where she states that, “Although Kahlo’s work is intensely autobiographical on the surface… her work was able to transcend the personal to have political and national relevance”, and thus be more universal in its focus. One of the elements most visible from Kahlo’s art practice was her concern with her mixed heritage and cultural identity, which was half-European and half-indigenous. This is explored in a variety of self-portraits, two notable examples of which are The Two Fridas and My Wet Nurse and I . In The Two Fridas, Kahlo depicts the division between her European self, on the left and clad in a white colonial dress, and her Mexican self, on the right and clothed in a traditional tehuana costume. In this way, she expresses her identity as a product of two cultures, which are separate, suggested by the painting almost to be opposites, yet connected by the delicate artery which runs from her European heart to her Mexican heart.
My Wet Nurse and I also deals with the idea of Kahlo’s composite cultural identity, and emphasises the importance of her indigenous Mexican heritage. In this work, a weak, helpless Frida, European by the appearance of her dress, is nourished by a wet nurse wearing an Aztec mask, an allusion to Mexico’s Amerindian heritage. Through the metaphor of the nurse, Kahlo seeks to convey the maternal and nurturing influence that Mexican culture had upon her. Unlike in The Two Fridas, where the two halves of her culture are shown on an equal standing, My Wet Nurse and I likens the relationship between her Mexican and European ancestries to that between mother and daughter, or nurturer and nurtured, suggesting her belief that indigenous culture was of key importance in strengthening and developing her sense of identity, as opposed to European culture, which is portrayed as inferior in strength and in need of support. The nurse can also be interpreted as an image of Frida’s Mexican self, providing strength and sustenance to a European self which she always perceived as weaker, particularly after her accident. Additionally, in several other later paintings by her, she is often portrayed in a national Tehuana dress, further showcasing the importance of Mexican culture in the formation of her identity.
Kahlo’s complex exploration of her cultural identity has often been attributed by critics to the “identity problems inherent in a mixed heritage… in being a first generation mestiza”, as Amie Gillingham argues. In many ways, however, Kahlo not only reflected her own composite cultural identity through her works, but rather the collective identity of a nation which, in the context of post-colonialism, was still trying to find its cultural place in the world. As Richard Dorment argues, “Kahlo turned herself into a symbol of Mexico itself, a country whose identity was divided between its indigenous Indian heritage and the equally powerful Spanish colonial presence.” It is also important to note that Kahlo painted in a time when Mexican culture was increasingly inspiring itself from its indigenous heritage and trying to distance itself from its colonial European past. This context may explain Kahlo’s preoccupation for her Mexican identity and the somewhat negative portrayals of her European identity in works such as My Wet Nurse and I.
A third aspect of identity which Kahlo has articulated in her works, and which has become increasingly studied by post-modern critics, is her gender. Although Kahlo cannot be classified as a feminist artist, some of her self-portraits exhibit feminist concerns and reflect the female component of her identity and the way she perceived this. One such work is Frida and Diego Rivera, painted in 1931, where she portrays herself alongside her husband, with whom she had a tumultuous relationship that included several separations and a divorce. In this painting, Frida is presented as weak and somewhat submissive: she is not only standing behind Rivera, but the size differential between him and her is exaggerated to make him appear dominant in the frame. In this way, Kahlo is alluding to the traditional female identity of her social context, and the way in which this identity was often projected upon her by others, who considered her to be “the wife of a great artist” rather than a mature practitioner on her own. This view is supported by the art historian and critic Edward Lucie-Smith, who argues that, despite her talent, Frida was viewed condescendingly at the time, as the “gifted but semi-amateur painter-wife of Diego Rivera”. Interpreted in another way, however, this painting could also convey the importance of Diego to Frida’s own identity, particularly considering that the work was finished in 1931, when their relationship problems had not yet intensified.
In her later paintings, Kahlo tends to be significantly more subversive of gender stereotypes, thus elucidating her own view of her feminine identity. The majority of her self-portraits, for example, focus on her own figure, often dominant in the frame and thus constructing a female who, despite the struggles she experiences and depicts, is independent and in control of her own identity. Her perception of herself as a strong female going against traditional gender roles is also hinted at by her repeated portrayal in the tehuana costume, which, aside from its nationalistic connotations, also makes reference to the indigenous women of the Tehuantepec region, who were known for their courage and their indomitable nature. Furthermore, in what is nowadays an iconic symbol of her practice, nearly all of her self-portraits depict her with thick eyebrows joined together at the bridge of the nose, and facial hair above her lip. In a way that is more akin to postmodernism, Kahlo hence seeks to subvert the traditional female identity of that time, and instead express her own perception of her femininity and gender identity.
Frida Kahlo’s works became increasingly well-known and critically appreciated in the 1970s and 1980s, decades after her death and mainly in the context of postmodernism and feminist art. Several second-wave feminist artists and critics interpreted Kahlo’s works as an attestation to the physical and emotional pain of the female experience, and she thus gained the status of role model in much of the feminist art world. According to the critic and commentator Joy Press, “Frida Kahlo was the perfect feminist heroine for the 1980s”, particularly due the representation of her identity through self-portraiture and the way in which she often subverted gender stereotypes, both of which were also key aims of the second-wave feminist artists. The “Kahlo cult”, as Press calls it, was augmented by the 1983 release of Hayden Herrera’s biography of the artist, titled Frida, which led to several artists finding inspiration in Kahlo’s works.
One notable example of an artist whose practice is similar to and arguably inspired by Kahlo is Cindy Sherman, an American artist who is also preoccupied with self-portraiture, female self-representation and the collective identity of her gender. Sherman, however, approaches the exploration of identity through self-portraiture from a different angle, recontextualising it to fit in with the post-modern paradigms of her time. She works, for instance, in new media, particularly photography and video, and the vast majority of her works are staged and role-played, often appropriating other representations of women in order to highlight social stereotypes. Unlike Kahlo’s works, which are generally deeply personal, Sherman does not seek to explore her individual identity, but is rather concerned with the collective identity and representation of females (the way they self-perceive and are perceived by others).
Perhaps Sherman’s best-known works are her Untitled Film Stills series, which were created between 1977 and 1980 and which feature the artist posing in sixty-nine photographs reminiscent of Hollywood movie scenes at that time. In each of the film stills, Sherman is never herself, but rather plays the role of different female characters. In this way, she explores the various stereotypes which construct society’s perceptions of female identity, particularly in the media, claiming that she only concluded the series when she “ran out of clichés”. In Untitled Film Still #35, for example, the artist plays the middle-aged housewife, subjected to a life of boredom and tedium as a result of her gender role. Untitled Film Still #15 presents a young woman gazing out of the window, her naked thighs and pose working together to create a sexualised portrayal of the female. Untitled Film Still #21 explores yet another identity stereotype, namely that of the young and confused female office worker, featuring copious amounts of makeup and gazing towards the metaphorical glass ceiling, uncertain of her future in a patriarchal world. By presenting females in their stereotypical roles, Sherman thus invites the audience to question the applicability of these roles, and whether female identity can adequately be defined in such narrow terms. Additionally, as the curator and designer Michael Douma argues, “her work encourages self-reflection in the spectator”, provoking female audiences to question their own identities in relation to the stereotypes presented. According to the artist herself, “part of the idea (of her works) is to get the audience to question their preconceived ideas about women, sex – things like that”.
Even though Sherman’s representation of female identity is intentionally-stereotypical, her work also conveys, subtly, a concern for feminine power and resilience. Despite the circumstances and struggles they are faced with, and the stereotypical identities projected upon them, her compositions are constructed in such a way that they maintain a sense of dignity. In Untitled Film Stills #35 and #21, for example, the artist captures herself from a low-angle shot, placing her in a position of strength and superiority. In Untitled Film Still #35, this is augmented by the determined glance and stance of the woman, who is presented almost as a female heroine, defiant in the face of her patriarchally-imposed role of housewife and the symbolically-begrimed room she is contained in. An alternative interpretation of Sherman’s film stills is also provided by Michael Douma, who argues that, when viewed as a whole, the work subverts the idea of a single, archetypal female identity simply because of the diversity of the artist’s portrayals, where “women adopt several roles and identities depending on their circumstances”. In this way, Sherman’s work can be seen as a manifestation of the complex and multifaceted nature of female identity.
Sherman’s later works, produced in the mid- to late-1980s, are also of key importance in understanding the ways in which she explored female identity. In Untitled #193, which is part of her series titled History Portraits/Old Masters, Sherman appropriates the painterly style and use of light of classical paintings, returning to the subject of the classical reclining female but giving it new meaning through recontextualisation. By recontextualising the reclining female as her own self-portrait, Sherman seeks to accentuate the inappropriateness of such traditional representations and identities of women in a contemporary, post-modern context, where the portrait appears to be anachronistic and almost humorous.
Cindy Sherman, as well as other feminist artists, are often seen as the forerunners of post-modern identity art, with other minority or disadvantaged groups, such as ethnic and LGBT communities, inspiring themselves from feminist art practice in order to visually-represent their own collective identities. In particular, a connection can be made between the art practices of Cindy Sherman and Yasumasa Morimura, a Japanese appropriation artist who similarly makes use of photographic self-portraiture by placing himself into several staged roles in order to represent identity stereotypes and then question their applicability. Unlike Sherman’s feminist concerns, however, Morimura utilises the self-portrait to explore issues of cultural identity in a globalised world, as well as his own sexual and gender identity. One of the best examples of Morimura’s concern with cross-cultural identity is After Brigitte Bardot 2 which was completed in 1996 and is part of his Self-portrait (actress) series. In this composition, Morimura appropriates himself into the figure of Brigitte Bardot, an archetype of American popular culture, who is depicted standing on a Harley Davidson motorbike, similarly valued in the American identity. The image, however, is removed from its natural context and instead placed into a stereotypical streetscape of downtown Osaka, Morimura’s native city. The resulting juxtaposition between Western and Eastern culture seeks to subvert the idea that identity can be defined in terms of national icons, such as the Bardots and Harley Davidsons of the USA and the narrow neon-lined streets of Japan. Rather, Morimura’s Bardot possesses a more complex, hybrid identity, augmented by the fact that she is played by an Asian male (the artist himself) while being quintessentially Western in terms of dress and cultural association. Consequently, the artist proposes that, in the current context of globalisation and transculturation, identity should be perceived as a composite of multiple identities, rather than as a single entity. When read from a post-colonial perspective, the work can also be seen as an articulation of Morimura’s Eastern identity and its increasingly important role in world culture. In this way, the recontextualisation of Bardot into a context where Eastern identity is normative represents a “reverse colonial conquest of the East over the West”, as critic Margaret Marsh puts it.
Morimura also explores identity through his appropriations of classical works, which are remarkably similar in technique to Sherman’s “History Portraits/Old Masters” series. In these photographs, the artist draws inspiration from well-known classical and early modernist painters but gives their works entirely new meanings by placing himself in the role of all of the subjects. A significant example of this is Portrait (Futago) an appropriation of Manet’s Olympia, where Morimura plays both the reclining nude and the black maid. Even though it is evident that Morimura’s personal identity is represented by neither of the two figures, his placement into their roles once again rejects the idea that identity is absolute or unitary, rather presenting it as fluid and ambiguous in nature. The work can also be seen as an example of post-ethnicism, considering that the work’s Morimura is at once Asian, white and black, and by representing himself as all ethnicities, he almost does away with the idea of ethnicity as a basis for distinct identity in the first place, or at least suggests that ethnicity is not a major component of his own personal identity.
Portrait (Futago) reveals yet another layer of identity when read in an LGBT context. Morimura’s choice to portray himself as female in his self-portrait, achieved through cross-dressing, challenges the notion of fixed, binary gender roles and instead constructs a more elastic gender identity. He thus provokes the audience to not only consider what constitutes distinct male and female identities, but also to reflect on the validity of gender-normativity in general. In fact, the fusion of male and female characteristics in his figure establishes an indifference for gender-based identity, alluding to a post-genderist view of the world. Alternatively, as a gay artist, Morimura may also be exploring his own sexual orientation through Portrait (Futago), thus revealing another aspect of his identity, or at least identity stereotypes commonly associated with gay people, such as effeminacy.
In the more recent years of his artist practice, Morimura has increasingly found inspiration in the works of Frida Kahlo, appropriating himself into in what he calls his “dialogue” with the Mexican self-portraiteur. In these staged photographs, such as Inner Dialogue with Frida Kahlo (Crown of Thorns), Morimura once again transcends gender and ethnic boundaries in order to reflect his post-modern view on the fluidity of identity. However, when viewed in the broader context of the art world and the links between artists, most critics have predominantly read Morimura’s Kahlo series as a tribute to Frida, reflecting his admiration for the artist and acknowledging, as critic John McGee argues, “the power and importance of her artwork”, particularly to the development of identity art and self-portraiture.
By examining the art practices of Frida Kahlo, Cindy Sherman and Yasumasa Morimura, it can be seen that all of these artists were concerned with the exploration of identity, both personal and collective, and the use of self-portraiture as a means to achieve this. Even though they lived in different contexts and interpreted identity in different ways, the three artists are significantly linked through the influence they had on one another. Kahlo, who chiefly explored her own, complex identity, had a noteworthy impact on both Sherman and Morimura, in part due to the “Frida cult” that was popularised from the 1970s onwards. Sherman also had an important influence on Morimura’s practice, with both artists working in appropriation and role playing in order to investigate how identity is constructed and represented. In turn, Sherman and Morimura’s practices have given Kahlo’s works new meaning when viewed in a contemporary context, enabling audiences to ascertain how “rich and complex” her art can be, in a “neat example of how the art of the present influences our responses to the art of the past”, according to critic Richard Dorment. This interplay between artists, which is a key component of the art world, has enabled the art of identity to present an increasingly-sophisticated examination of the human condition and of human societies and the way they perceive themselves and are perceived by others.
By Bianca Andreea Marin
During her 25 years of career, Maria João Franco has become an intransigent pursuer of interior truth and liberty, being an artist in constant changing yet managing to remain true to herself.Maria João Franco marks the contour, captures the movement, turns into reality an idea, within a pictorial imagery which gained her a noteworthy place in the Portuguese Fine Arts.Her art is deeply connected with the body, be it either the human body or the body of things.There is a warm and tender involvement in her paintings which figurates our condition, and which confers harmony and beauty to the triviality of the ordinary life.Her painting, in which rhythm is a stylistic element, declares the autonomy of colour, of utmost importance.It is a painting of immediate gesture, of capture of space, of the vanity of existing, by restoring the lost childhood and creating a new way in which we look at things.Maria João Franco’s art is extremely sensitive to the fluidity of the languages of the forms, to the strong materiality of the colour, to the force and charm of its evasion and its ecstasy. It is a fascinating and wonderful journey, both spiritual as well as technical.Therefore, her works are the materialization of feelings of longing, dreams, and became important notes in the Contemporary Portuguese Painting. The devotion and commitment of Maria João Franco reveal to us the definite fact that we stand in the presence of a great painter, an excellent artist, recognised as such not only in Portugal, but also abroad.
And the will therein lieth, which dieth not. Who knoweth the mysteries of the will, with its vigor? For God is but a great will pervading all things by nature of its intentness. Man doth not yield himself to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will. Joseph Glanvill
Charles Baudelaire once said that art has the miraculous privilege to turn ugliness into beauty, and that pain, when rhythmic and cadenced, fills the spirit with a quiet joy.
When verses turn into colours, ideas into textures, feelings into substances we enter an eerie world where poetry meets painting, birth meets death, love meets pain and flowers meet mould. It is the strange and delicate world of a painter, Maria João Franco, a poetess of the canvas. I would dare say that she does not paint, she writes verses using colours, forms and shades, light and darkness instead of words.
What is a word? It is an instrument by means of which we send a message, convey a feeling. If this definition is accurate, then her paintings are letterless words, because they overwhelmingly transmit feelings and emotions.
Her works are a confession of hopes, dreams, failures and sins expressed by plastic metaphors, chromatic epithets, where the immateriality of all the most important things (love, despair, sadness, tragedy) embraces the cloak of the flesh until they lie, exposed, strip naked on the canvas, bleeding like a baby first ripped out of her mother’s womb. They tremble, amazed at their own existence, at their own life. The painful, tragic, screaming moment of birth that also seals our doom. It is difficult to look at them, at human emotions and fears. How would we live if our feelings materialized in front of us? This seems to be the questions that Maria João Franco boldly asks. We would not be able to hide from them, nor to force them out of our mind. It would be our most terrible tragedy, as human beings, to be forced to look at our materialized, touchable emotions, at our utmost secrets and thoughts. Nobody would survive the screaming sincerity of facing ourselves and the world would turn into a desolated sanatorium with people trying to escape from themselves.
Have you ever had a dream whose powerful image haunted you the day after? Imagine living each and every day under the constant assault, a material, colourful, loud siege of not one, but all of your desires, dreams, fears, anger. Even love would become a burden, as true love generally is so hard to bear.
When we look at one of Maria João´s paintings, our faces unconsciously make a grin, and our eyes seem to want to turn away, but at the same time they are drawn to them as if hypnotised. It is because we all recognise parts of ourselves in them, and usually there are the parts that we mostly like to hide: fear of death, horror of putrefaction, lost of faith, the never-ending questions of the man seeking Immortality, unwilling to give in to the decay of the body and the claws of death.
What if we should look of them in the eyes? What if the key to ending the pain is embracing it, facing it? What if the only way to conquer death is by accepting it? What if the only way to love is to let ourselves be consumed by it?
I am drawn to these paintings in the same way as I am drawn to the poetry of Baudelaire, Arghezi or Blaga. Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal attempts to extract beauty from the malignant. Unlike traditional poetry that relied on the serene beauty of the natural world to convey emotions, Baudelaire thought that beauty could evolve on its own, irrespective of nature and even fuelled by sin. The result is a clear opposition between two worlds, "spleen" and the "ideal." Spleen signifies everything that is wrong with the world: death, despair, solitude, murder, and disease. In contrast, the ideal represents a transcendence over the harsh reality of spleen, where love is possible and the senses are united in ecstasy.
Just as in Baudelaire’s verses, Maria Joõa Franco is endlessly confronted with the fear of death, the failure of her will, and the suffocation of her spirit.
One of the most amazing similarities lie in the comparison of Baudelaire’s poems “The Cat” (inspired by Edgar Allen Poe's Tales of Mystery and Imagination, where he saw Poe's use of fantasy as a way of emphasizing the mystery and tragedy of human existence) and Maria João Franco’s painting “The Dog”. In two separate poems both entitled "The Cat," the poet is horrified to see the eyes of his lover in a black cat whose chilling stare, "profound and cold, cuts and cracks like a sword."( “Je vois avec étonnement/ Le feu de ses prunelles pâles,/ Clairs fanaux, vivantes opales/Qui me contemplent fixement).
In “The Dog” the same terror is provoked by the big, stout dog with his face directed to a river of blood, and one can easily distinguished the form of a human face appearing in the place of the dog’s head. It is as if Baudelaire’s verses came to life in images, it is sheer Baudelaire poetry on canvas.
Moreover in “The Laying woman”(Deitada) a feminine figure seems to be sleeping or laying dead, her body torn into hundreds of little atoms, reduced to small dispersed fragments, traces of paint flowing from her like drops of water. It is yet another example of how beauty can reside even in the most horrible moments. The image created by the irregularity of the forms and the play of the splashes of paint is so beautiful that it seems as if flowers were growing out of her decaying body, the fertilizing territory of human flesh. Flowers of putrefaction, flowers of mould, the Romanian poet Tudor Arghezi would say. Maria João Franco makes caresses out of open wounds, “out of furuncles moulds and mud” (Tudor Arghezi, Testament) she creates “new beauties and treasures” (Tudor Arghezi, Testament)
Maria João Franco is not obsessed with the ugliness or the pain. She accepts all the aspects of humanity, even the most infamous, because, as I said before, this may be the only way to extinguish them. The objective of her paintings is not to shock, but to heal. Her love for the human being is such, that its physical decay hurts her to the extent of endlessly trying to conquer it. It is a painful, deep love for the transient human body in all its circumstances, even in death. We can hear Maria Jiao Franco’s voice speaking to us through the words of poet Lucian Blaga in his poetic statement “I will not crush the world’s corolla of Wonders”: “I enrich the darkening horizon with chills of the great secret. All that is hard to know becomes a greater riddle under my very eyes because I love alike flowers, lips, eyes, and graves”.
In order to understand a painting we should look at it with eyes of a poet. It is easy to recognized fragments of Maria Jiao Franco’s paintings in the verses of a poem. I tried to present here her paintings as seen through the verses of three poets that explain them better than any critical essay. There are no boundaries in art, and it would be no wonder if some day a poet would inspire himself from one of Maria João Paintings to create his poetry.
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