The pieces exhibited in the current show of Zvi Lachman’s work create a place, a place of their own.
LACHMAN: THE PLACE OF PAINTING
by Hagi Kenaan
The pieces exhibited in the current show of Zvi Lachman’s work create a place, a place of their own. The paintings not only show themselves, but they also reveal our presence there, within that place. This place, however, despite its immediacy, doesn’t disclose itself easily. Where are we then? What is this place, whose various faces reveal themselves in multiple rhythms through the materiality of Lachman’s colors, through the plasticity of his space? What place is opened for us through the artist’s dialogue with the history of art (with Velazquez or with Rembrandt, for example), through his autobiographical references (such as in Yellow Arrow), through his confrontation with primary myths like the Sacrifice of Isaac? How should we understand this place?
Let us first consider a different place at a different time – the primordial event of the birth of painting. Legend tells us that the source of painting lies in a long lost moment of separation between two lovers. A Corinthian girl (who bears the name of her father, the potter Butades), mournful at her parting from her lover who is going far away, finds a way to preserve something of the lover’s presence by tracing his shadow on a wall, and in so doing, paints the silhouette of his profile. Butades makes the shadow of her lover permanent. She doesn’t create being out of nothing, but rather repeatedly reconstructs a line that is itself part of nature. At the same time, it is a line that has never actually belonged to the object itself, but rather serves as witness to its existence. Despite, or perhaps because of, the primacy and simplicity of the traced shadow, the image of that shadow became a symbol of that ‘Ur-painting’ from which the art of painting sprung. But the story has a sequel that the tradition tends to forget. In fact, the first mention of this anecdote in Pliny is not intended to explain the origin of painting at all, but rather that of a completely different kind of art. According to Pliny, Butades’ father used the outline of his daughter’s painting to prepare a relief – a clay portrait later preserved in the Shrine of the Nymphs. For Pliny, the story of Butades reveals the origin of sculpture – the sculpting of images out of clay.
How is all this relevant to understanding the place from which we look at Lachman’s paintings? In my opinion, the materials from which Butades’ story is built are the same materials that make the place we are trying to understand. This is a place that unfolds by an act that is itself the deed that it effects: the drawing of a line. As in the case of Butades’ line, this place too takes the form of a border or limit- the limits of light, the limits of vision. The place is made out of the ephemeral, but similar to the way that Butades’ line frees the shadow from its constant wavering, so this place also develops from a confrontation with time, out of a search for timeless time. And again, like the line that Butades draws, the place constituted by Lachman’s work is full of the tension between love and loss (or in Freudian terms, between eros and thanatos). This is the place of memory, and yet, not one that clings on to the past, but that which is open, rather, to the future (Butades’ gaze is directed beyond the shoulder of her lover, toward that which she cannot see).
And what about the relationship of father and daughter, of the father’s clay and the daughter’s painting? Today, the presence of clay may seem irrelevant to painting. But it seems to me that this ancient connection is alive and important in Lachman’s work. First of all, as with Butades, in the paintings before us the family setting is prior to any specific content. The family is always a complex horizon that precedes any specific desire. This is also the case of Butades who is found in the fissure between a lover who constitutes the source for her creation without being a part of it, and a father who is a partner to that creation without being able to understand its source or acknowledge its independent existence. The father is ,therefore, understood to be,the clay horizon of the daughter’s painting. He is what allows painting to materialize, but also what threatens, precisely because of its materiality, the subtle movement of painting. Similarly, Lachman’s painting is primarily connected to the element of earth. This is the kind of painting whose movement is generated by the power of the earth and always in tension with the movement of the clouds. Moreover, what underlies the event of painting is the need to be released, like Butades, from the limits and limitations of matter and materiality, i.e., from the corporeality of clay.
What Lachman’s work opens up for us is none other than the space of painting.
