• Last Chance: Ilya Schar’s Mortal Colors – By Jamey Hecht

    Date posted: June 23, 2006 Author: jolanta
    Klimt’s teeming backgrounds are here, as is Schiele’s strange mixture of elegance and ponderous sadness.

    Last Chance: Ilya Schar’s Mortal Colors

    By Jamey Hecht

     
    “Why”

    “Why”

     

     
     
    Klimt’s teeming backgrounds are here, as is Schiele’s strange mixture of elegance and ponderous sadness. Consider "Why," a big canvass (34" x 49") with a prisoner at its center. The figure is painfully human, heavy, vivid in his despondent rootedness — even though there’s no chair, no floor, no horizon, only the psychic weather of some fluctuating, unanchored shapes. He’s not floating. It’s as if we see him as he really is, seated and stuck, but with all the elements of his real environment subtracted from view. And in their place, tenderly childlike animal forms hover mutely around him. His yellow Jude badge, striped prison pants and ragged shirt mark him as a vulnerable, exceptional, doomed figure, but he’s the only human being in the painting’s world. He’s you. As Hamlet says, "Denmark’s a prison… then is the world one… a goodly one, with many confines, wards, and dungeons…" The man with the gray face can no more escape from the painting than the viewer can escape from the body. The mortal staring out at your mortality is the representative of mankind, as the Nazi’s knew but couldn’t admit: the Untermensch is Everyman.
    This universal loneliness is the best story in Schar’s repertoire, and each time he tells it there is something to learn. Since Aeschylus, it’s been a mystery why we experience such joy at the sight of the misery in art. Framed by the four sticks around a picture or the four walls (one of them invisible) around a theatrical proscenium, our suffering can be brought out of the heart and into the eyes, where its terrible beauty shows itself. "Joker" is as touching a picture as Redon’s "Cyclops" or his "Cactus Man," which are precedents in this quite ancient genre — the single figure marooned in a useless environment which, whether beautiful or ugly or blank, can’t help him with that inherent sorrow that constitutes lyric existence. This is not the epic tradition. It is the lyric in which you, and the painter, and all his sorry characters are caught. The tune the Joker plays on his pipe is a song in the first person — "I…."

    Like Odilon Redon, Schar will either paint these single-human pictures or highly charged still lifes of floral arrangements and natural flowering plants, but I don’t know of any social paintings by either artist. Schar has several pictures (like "Big Secret," and "Woman’s Eyes") of a black space filled with floating facemasks, but there are no complete, embodied persons together in friendship or competition. If "Big Secret" is social at all, it’s a society in which everybody knows the same secret and nobody is talking to anyone else (it is still a secret). Social needs are met only in Schar’s animal pictures, where a little population can exist together in what looks like a safe continuum. "Beaks" is a group of quiet birds all facing the same direction; "Frog Dance" shows six beautiful green frogs in a ring, with a seventh staring forward from the center. That central frog may be the isolated lyric prisoner from "Why," but here his encirclement consists of fellow frogs, not the heartbreaking shapes of his lost innocence. Schar’s animal pictures have both love and envy in them (from the artist, toward the animals). To quote the poet John Berryman, "Bats have no bankers and they do not drink / and cannot be arrested and pay no tax / and, in general, bats have it made."

    Schar uses an idiosyncratic potion of heated glue and fine-ground dust that he personally crushes out from a wide variety of naturally occurring stones. In our moment of history, the painter who grinds his own pigments from minerals is making a gesture of self-definition. In the age before industrial manufacture of paints, one either ground one’s own pigments or had an apprentice do it. But today it’s a gesture of dissent from mass-production, as is painting altogether. You don’t have to be Walter Benjamin to feel that the handicraft of the aesthetic object is totally different from the buzzing universe of consumer-driven stuff. Ilya Schar’s butterflies come from the same archaic Nature that produced their colors on the linen. And one of Schar’s greatest strengths is his independence and power as a colorist.

    The legacy of Klimt brings up Austria’s final efflorescence before the collapse of Weimar culture, yet here it is, alive and radiant, with the eventual Holocaust victim blinking in the middle. Similarly, Redon’s late-nineteenth century flower paintings are a last bloom of the natural accord between human beings and the biosphere, but here is the same fascination and intimacy of those pictures in the flower paintings of Ilya Schar. It’s as if these great moments in European painting, prior to the Second and the First World Wars respectively, were reborn in the work of an original new painter whose own historical moment is much the same — a last chance to be human.

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