Writings from Edit deAk and Izhar Patkin 

​PORTRAIT OF A BUST by Edit deAk!

Catalog published by M Galleria d'arte, Firenze, 1989

 

I love all this gargoyle stuff. The imaging of the spirit world; masks, mirages, shadows, refractions, ghosts, grotesques, grisailles, etc. -- These interfaces of intangibilities get their only chance at existing for real, as an image. I am wildly jealous of my hinterland of mercurial manifestations, so if anyone cups to it, they better live up to the clouds.

 

With his title, Patkin decidedly sets up forcelines of his work with "The Villa Palagonia"of the specially Baroque Sicily. Palagonia -- I don't know what the name stands for (but it sounds so pretty), sounds like a country of its own, a realm, a realm which is a villa. It is in the village of Bagheria (sounds like little buggers...). Atop the wall enclosing the villa are grotesque sculptural gargoyles with a dubious dual function. Their strange appearance is to repel the evil eye. Yet, they are quite attractive as they are absorbed in the pleasures of frolicking and dancing, having fun at their bacchanalia. This odd duality, Patkin identifies with the "stuff of art". Creativity and inspiration are odd phenomena. In this sense, these creatures are the embodiment of imagination itself.

 

Tom was sculpted in 1985, in wax over a bust. This found armature is internalized by externally applying layers of wax veils to it. Endowed with four faces, Tom is a double/double Janus. There is the front visage of right side up and upside down portraits, and the mask on the back of the head reads upside down and right side up as well. The topsy-turvy gravity is spun around its center with a tulle tutu and tied down with a bowed ribbon to a work easle - the sort which is used in the studio by the sculpting trade. This choice of pedestal belies Parkin's attitude that if it can hold up the creative process, it can hold up the result - it can take responsibility in its presentation. The notion of presentation of the creative process pops up frequently elsewhere in the work. Rosario, made in 1987, is again in wax over a plaster armature of a vessel -- urnlike (if you are religious-minded) or Sarnovarish (if that's your cup of tea). Atop and around this sculpture are praying hands and roses. And, if that doesn't make it a very curious object, Rosario is also enrobed in a multi-sleeved pellerine of tulle with lace, ribbon, embroidery and bows.

 

In 1989 this repertoire of wax sculptures was staged for photographic tableaux in the spirit of the painters of grisaille, who translated white marble statues into trompe l'oeil tableaux. There is still that all-important issue of what point of view to photograph a sculpture from; involving the severe editing of a 3-d thing, the photograph really determines the sculpture. That's the usual contention. But, Tom and Rosario are so photogenic and seem to project so many perfect 2-d pictures that one might think that their primary function is not in their objecthood but to generate endless imagery. For their photo portraits, being the picture perfect models that they are, the sculptures are in poised synchrony with their backdrop of white Victorian lace of ivy and peacocks. This curtain motif echos the tulle outfits. And, to really pull the punches on the issue of seeing through, there is a third level of reverberation as the large scale photographs are literally perforated in an all over pattern. These elusive grisaille "photo-screens" shimmer with a kind of waxy surface as if covered with a thin layer of translucent vaseline, like Leonardo's gentle sheen, so sublime -- in their effects, like a truly great painting. Although they are photos, with lots of respectable fancy footing of their own medium, I still sense from them an overwhelmingly delicate pale chiaroscuro of painting. And they are really painterly. They feel like beautiful great paintings inspite of being photographic, and of sculputure, and perforated and on paper and collaged and melanged and dipped and shredded and lit and discolored and reversed and cropped and blown up and pinned and all... Visually, they acheive an almost Rubenesque painterly breath of quality in the way that the portraits of the wax portraits look like oil paintings with all their inner light releasing itself.

 

​Izhar: They really represent my fear of painting.

 

Edit: I was astonished to see these pieces because your trade mark has been to go through extraordinary lengths to remove yourself from your work, to play hide and seek in a maze of techniques commonly characterized by the way they were enabling you not to paint. You have set up a multidimensional labyrinthian system to avoid the direct touch (the primal expression). What is intriguing in this new work is that you are utilizing those very process-vocabularies of avoidence and yet, you have created something extraordinary in the language of painting. But I must stop this elation so I can quickly get in what I consider the true punch line of these pieces.

It is magic how all of this comes out of the hat as this icon rabbit. These images are actuaily icons! Patkin somehow made an icon out of something which is not supposed to be one. It is anicon of a ghost!

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THE CREDO OF MY GHOSTING PROCESS by Izhar Patkin 

Catalog published by M Galleria d'arte, Firenze, 1989

 

The wax phase of sculpting is where the creative process nestles. Later, it is the job of the artisan -- the other side of the craft.

It is the stage of the not yet presentable. It is the private, the intimate and the vulnerable phase (also that which gets thrown away). It is the soul of sculpting, not the commodity of it.

 

When you go inward, there is a darkness from which a kind of albinoness comes out. Light hasn't developed the image yet. There is no chlorophyll. It is before it hits the proverbial "photo" -- the notion of an amorphous kind of being born, not fully molded as you reach in and pull on it. The features show this (mellow)drama of pulling and tugging (witness the grimace of Tom's face) not quite firmly set . You are literally formulating the shape, developing the albino image from the dark into the light, regurgitating these figments of your image-ination. I celebrate and protect the artistic process in the way the grotesques of Palagonia trasform their predicament to celebrate the mysterious oddity of creation. I want my icons to be the embodiment of these apparitions which we call inspiration.

 

Against the diligent modernist and postmodernist stream which throws away and loses the baby (the icon) with the water (inspiration) for the sake of higher "objective" formalisms of a new improved reality, for me, there is no lost wax process. I want a nice formalist ghost (...), seamless and ethereal, one that symbolizes passing through the wall that seperates us, so that it no longer excludes but becomes a point of exchange. A soft seductive invitation. On the wall of the villa, the grotesques -- first a put off... quickly dissolve to be the benign types; the strange "other" calls for play. I want everything! And, I want it à la mélange!

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