Lachman: The Act of Seeing
Geoffrey Hartman
I have followed
Zvi Lachman’s work for many years with growing interest. He is surely one
of the best, if not the best sculptor working presently in Israel. His series
of “Heads,” at once so material and yet porous, fully modeled, and
which must be viewed from all sides, bear witness (in the fullest sense of “bear”)
to the responsibility of giving body to what is rarely perceived as carrying
rather than being carried. The heads become a kind of microcosm, recapitulating
an archaic as well as modern gravity. Because sculpture, like painting, is a
form of silent poetry, the force of Lachman’s creations persuades us not
by way of any didactic imposition but by intensifying the act of seeing itself,
adding to it a reflective kind of weight, very similar to the impact of thought
on the intense thinker.
It is interesting that in many of Lachman’s sculptures and pastels the act
of seeing is linked to an imminent transgression, that an unease of the eyes
is strongly suggested, one that makes this act more burdened still. The transgression,
moreover, is as much in the artist ( who takes up topics of vanity, as well as
scenes of massacre and misery from the treasure house of previous art) as in
the subjects he portrays. This theme, however muted, of the artist as (necessarily)
a voyeur seems to flow from Lachman’s sensitivity to a tradition-inspired
scruple concerning idolatry and the making of images.
While Zvi Lachman
was in America this past summer, I was able to observe him at work, and particularly
on a new series of paintings which, basically, are homages to certain classic
paintings in our canon, such as “Las Meninas,” “The Raft of the
Medusa,” and “The Murder of the Innocents.” Lachman’s ability
to renew these paintings is remarkable. It reminds one of what Cezanne did to
certain works of his great precursor Delacroix, whom he “abstracted”
to bring out oblique lines of force as well as color values that, in Cezanne
who is focused on landscape, no longer have the support of a topical, that is,
realistic or quasi-realistic subject-matter (whether historical or Biblical,
and almost always oriental or exotic). In Lachman also, these classic paintings
are abstracted, but very differently: they are seen through a veil that makes
them harder rather than easier to see, and that not only takes away their reliance
on an exotic or dramatic interest but reveals their as if archeological affinity
to archaic media. As with his “Heads,” but relying purely on paint
or pastel, what was a primal “earth-work” in the sculptures becomes
an elemental work of light, air, and shimmering color nuance uncovering an ancient
substratum–-say the luminous shadow of a pre-Roman fresco.. I would call
Lachman’s technique one of over-painting: intellectually as well as palpably
it is a technique that pays homage to the priority and influence of the great
masters, yet at the same time refers us back to something primal from which they
themselves had to emerge: an assault of too much light, of too much matter, of
an overbearing—and seductive—chaos of perceptions.
This labor of emergence,
in Lachman, has always to contend with an opposite tendency: an Abrahamic iconoclasm,
a distrust of the simulacrum. Lachman’s paintings, therefore, are powerful
simplifications, like those of Cezanne when taking on Delacroix, yet also more
mysterious, in the sense of withdrawing from sight. The artist seems to grasp
at what is about to be lost, or what he feels he must forfeit: his is a memorial
as well as truly contemporary art, and it suggests the possibility of founding
a new, postmodern, even—I would venture to say—Hebraic kind of classicism.
It would be wonderful if this important Israeli artist could exhibit in the United
States works from this new phase, as well as some of his already acclaimed paintings,
drawings, and sculptures.
