THE HUMAN COMEDY: the END of the ROAD Gideon Ofrat 2012
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THE HUMAN COMEDY: THE END OF THE ROAD Gideon Ofrat 2012 "Jonah, don't die! Don't leave me, Jonah! We still have to grow old, have you forgotten? All the hard, exhausting work, the work of aging And of wearing away, the daily work of despair, The illnesses, the waning strength, and the fear- Oh, the fate of death that creeps about during those long sleepless nights- It's not fair that you lay the entire burden on my shoulders. I don't have the strength for it alone." (Hanoch Levin, Life's Work, 1989) The monumental format (Okun: "I chose to paint on a hard plywood surface as a substitute for a wall painting"), served the Romantic painters for depictions of grand-themed history paintings of the apotheosis of heroic leaders or historic battles (Francois Gerard, The Battle of Austerlitz, 1810, I.: 9.58m), for scenes of ancient Roman feasts (Thomas Couture, Romans of the Decadence, 1847, I. 7.75m), and for scenes from the Bible (Fernand Cormon, Cain, 1880, I. 7.0m). Such large-scale formats were employed earlier by Renaissance artists for depicting multi-figure scenes from the New Testament (Paolo Veronese, Marriage at Cana, 1563, I. 9.90m). However, the monumental format was utilised above all in the church altarpiece, primarily depicting the Passion of Christ, and mainly the Crucifixion, Deposition, Entombment, Resurrection, and the Ascension of Christ and of his mother, Mary. These were heroic platforms for the depiction of the heroic, mythic, spiritual elevation of man to the Divine, or alternatively, of the cruelty of humankind toward God. Lo and behold! Moving forward in time and place to Jerusalem in 2012, the crowded scenes of hedonistic Rome that unfolded against the backdrops of grand palaces have given way to the twelve monumental paintings by Alexander (Sasha) Okun to operatic anti-myth "chamber pieces" at the center of which are displayed the misery of humankind in its demise. The nubile bodies of youthful male and female citizens of Ancient Rome, the might of daring Roman warriors, not to mention the spirituality of saints, have been rejected and replaced by the flabby, fat and infirm (perhaps already dead) bodies of anonymous decrepit men and women. While Cormon's aged Cain was joined on his wanderings by a young wife and offspring, there is no next generation for Okun's pathetic elderly protagonists: they appear before us at the final strait of their lives, struggling to perform that grand finale, the salto mortale of their fading existence. Neither a benevolent nor a jealous Father awaits them in the empty blue heavens or cloud-filled skies above. Nature is indifferent to their existence. Below them lies a monotonous desert devoid of sublime glory. No Son of God will forgive them from above, no heavenly mother will offer them solace. Okun's Ascension paintings are saturated with a grotesque bitterness about the despicable human condition, a tragicomedy in which the triumphant poses of the damned only serve to worsen their humiliation to the point of loathsomeness. For in his own 'sublime' classical style, Sasha Okun paints man's ignominy bordering on the abject. The nude holds sway in these works, though not even the faintest hint of eroticism is discernible. On the contrary, the body is depleted of want, desire, or lust. Worse than the figure being so exposed is that they are exposed by an artist devoid of compassion. Actually, Okun already mistreated his elderly subjects in an earlier series of paintings Breaking News (2008, Jerusalem Artists' House), in which they were depicted in the midst of ridiculous and humiliating sexual acts (even worse than those portrayed by Otto Dix between 1923 and 1925). Then as now, there is not one shred of the spiritual in the 'Okunian' sphere. Everything is about the body: a perishable body that is simultaneously affecting and repugnant. The infinite, all-encompassing ethereal heavens and the recurring floating only emphasises and intensify the heaviness of the flaccid, neglected fat body. In the series of paintings from the first decade of the twenty-first century, and certainly in these more recent works, Sasha Okun once again proves himself to be the 'Hanoch Levin of Israeli painting': his persistence in depicting the final act of human life in such a pathetic and humiliating tragicomic light, and at the same time, presenting the absurd human denial of the wretchedness and abjectness of old age and death, could not but remind us of scenes from Levin's plays, such as the one in Everybody Wants to Live (1985), where the Baron Poznay, who is sentenced to death, offers his old dying father a deal that would transfer his own death sentence to his dying father. "....tripping on feet that are failing on the way to the grave?! How many times have you said to me, father. "I have no more strength, there is no point in living, I want to die already, to rest"?! What are you waiting for, father?! Another round of cupping, a truss, castor oil, haemorrhoid cream?". Sasha Okun, whose affinity with the theatre has been variously demonstrated by the theatricality of his paintings and by his own earlier, albeit short, involvement with the theatre, also 'converses' with Nissim Aloni's The Bride and the Butterfly Catcher (1966), in his portrayal of naked old men and women, nets in hand, in pursuit of a butterfly. In 1966, Yosl Bergner painted the silhouette of a butterfly-catcher and a butterfly at rest on the side of a building which Aloni translated into a poetic drama of the absurd about a clerk named Getz who tries to capture the illusion of fleeting happiness. Aloni's Getz shows up every Wednesday at the city park with his net in order to catch butterflies. In his play The Deceased Gone Wild (1980), Aloni revisits Getz after fourteen years, in order to portray him on the verge of middle age in all his petit-bourgeois ordinariness that is without a trace of any redemptive butterfly souls. Okun interprets the Bergner-Alonian butterfly- catcher decades later,when he is approaching the finish line of his life. In three separate paintings, Okun portrays him still chasing after that unattainable butterfly. Now, our hero appears in the middle of a desert (no longer in a paradisaical garden), old, bald, paunchy, his body worn out, his muscles sagging, but he still casts his gaze upward toward the empty skies hoping for that butterfly that he will never find and never catch. And, as he gaily skips and waves his net, his shame is exposed in a brilliant vaudevillian show of the wear and tear and foolishness of holding onto an illusion. Okun portrays this whole human comedy, this cruel existentialist satire, in the classic language of art, which he peppers with grotesque caricature. Accordingly, an affinity (among others) with the satiric caricature of the British artist William Hogarth lies hidden behind the imposing affinity of these works with classical Renaissance painting: here, a reference to Michelangelo and the monumental human form, there, references to motifs from the paintings of Botticelli, Raphael, Lucas Cranach, among others. "I arrived in the country from the Hermitage." Okun reminds us of Leningrad and the environment of classical painting in which he grew up before he immigrated here in 1979. Indeed, we cannot but wonder at the rare expertise of the artist, his phenomenal craftsmanship and his understanding of color; we would be hard pressed to find comparable examples in our region (emphasising accordingly, Okun's deviation from the language of the 'Hershberg' school of Israeli realism). Besides his exemplary control of human anatomy, where Okun succeeds is in his ability to endow the topography of the human body with the gentle qualities of landscapes, and fill the cellulite-riddled skin with delicate, nuanced, picturesque textures. I first encountered the paintings of Sasha Okun in May 1982, at an exhibition of his paintings at the Debbel Gallery in Ein Kerem. Even back then I was impressed by their simultaneous iconic quality and volumetric exaggeration, although Okun was still using muted colour and favoured static scenes. Okun, who was active in Leningrad in the Jewish Avant-garden group 'Aleph", exhibited a clear Christian tendency in his early Jerusalem works (even when he depicted the Jerusalem market stalls). Thus, I already recognized a plain intent in the nakedness of the figures: Their state of undress, that divests them of labels that are too individual and too local, is intended to elevate them to the mythological level of a saint. Yes, a saint, because despite all the grotesqueness that inhabits the surroundings, a metaphysical lightness settles on Okun's figures. On this plane his figures lead us either to the Madonna or the Devil. (Kol Yerushalayim, May 21, 1982). Theatricality was powerfully present even then, if only in the stage-set ambiance that resonated in the paintings. Italian Renaissance roots were also apparent: Okun, as a "neo-Platonist," sculpts most of his figures, as if continuing the classical hierarchy of the supremacy of sculpture over painting. (Kol Yerushalayim, May 21, 1982) Thirty years later, I once again come face to face with the paintings of Sasha Okun and make a mental note of the great strides this painter has made in the degree of his painterly quality and his courage to look, without mercy, directly into the eyes of his flesh and bloody subjects. For, apart from their painterly quality, these twelve paintings by Okun are literature and drama that dare to confront the 'grand themes' on existential and theological planes: this is "pittura maggiore", great painting at its best.