CHAKI A BREATH OF LIGHT 1 WINDOW 1427 oil on canvas, 38 x 30 in. CHAKI A BREATH OF LIGHT 198 Davenport Rd, Toronto ON M5R 1J2 Canada I 416.962.0438 or 800.551.2465 I [email protected] odonwagnergallery.com NOT SO STILL LIFE When looking at the works of Yehouda Chaki a format, a title, repeatedly and methodically it’s quite natural to think of the French painter until the viewer shares a palpable sense of time THE PERSISTENT GAZE Paul Cezanne, especially his pieces that uniquely passing. This is largely so because in the end the OF YEHOUDA CHAKI bridged impressionism to cubism, and this secret subject of all painting is Time itself. So it observation is meant in the best possible way. But is with subjects such as Light, Mountain, Passage, By Donald Brackett rather than the rainbow of chaos alluded to by Flowers and his ongoing absorption with the Cezanne, in Chaki we have a calm ceremony of model Nona. Such is the case especially with the colour which is poetically organized, consistently window series, a splendid still life sequence where balanced and explored with a persistent gaze. He any subtly implied window is strictly an open zone “We live in a brilliant rainbow is a mature and long-distance painter, carrying of vitality, within which a pot of flowers resides of beautiful chaos…” the energies and colours of Athens, Tel Aviv and restlessly. Montreal along with him on his personal journey Paul Cezanne across the messy map of art history. He invites us to witness a not so still life, and instead they are alive with an almost animal His accumulation of painterly experience is most magnetism, a presence which I suppose we must evident in his mesmerizing use of muted colour identify as the botanical soul. And they remind us merged with primal forms. “Makrinitsa”, a village in again that a landscape is also a kind of still life, Thessaly Greece, is a good example of this muted as is a portrait in a very real sense. But whichever tone used to great effect. Nature is rendered here motif he chooses to render, he often seems to through a nurtured gaze, one that doesn’t require combine all four (portrait, still life, landscape and overly bright colours as a distraction. abstract) in a single painting. A landscape is just a bigger tabletop after all, and a portrait is merely At first glance loosely ordered, his works are another kind of human flower pot, and all art is actually rigorously designed to internalize the already an abstraction from nature. outward sensations arriving at the painter’s eye and to systematically communicate them to the In fact, to call them pictures is slightly inaccurate, viewer’s eyes. He does this by employing a riot of since they are more like technicolour movies which colour but not a disordered riot, rather a kind of he has frozen before our eyes. Somehow Chaki stately procession through his perception of light, has been able to carry the light of Athens and Tel which he shares with us using a consummate Aviv with him to his current residence of Montreal, skill honed over many years as a practitioner of where a new and special Canadian light has been painted poems. added to his arsenal. I don’t know how he does this, perhaps he carries this light in his eyes, transfers it His paintings appear to be full of thoughtful to his canvases, from which glistening surfaces it pauses, “October Light 1310” being a fine is transferred to us. Maybe it’s better not to know evocation of seasonal change, where one can how in the end, and instead just be thankful that almost feel the wind rattling leaves which barely for several decades he has also taught drawing appear attached to trees on a sparkling riverbank. and painting at the Saidye Bronfman Centre of He maximizes a moment here, transmitting it to us Montreal (and is still an artistic advisor there), in a way more real than any photograph, because where at least future generations of artists have we can not just see but feel the light itself seeping been able to benefit from his alchemy. into that hard autumnal ground. Especially in today’s heavily digitalized world of Perhaps most appealing is his use of a serial synthetic images, his kind of ancient foundational technique, returning to a theme, a motif, a subject, basis for the creation of analog artifacts is even more important, not just to our minds and eyes, but to our hearts as well. In an interval, an interstitial moment between perception, expression and reception, we can identify the importance not just of the juxtaposition of quiet, muted colours next to vocal, bright ones, but something even more mysterious: the microscopic-spaces between the brushstrokes. This is where the secret of a great painting resides, maybe even where it hides from us, inviting us to search for it silently, in order to unearth the macroscopic level of the represented image. Sometimes the smallest painting can contain the largest insights using his macroscope: “Cypress Tel Aviv” is only 9 x 7 inches, and both “Looking Up 1456-W” and “Looking Right” are 12 x 14 inches, yet they all have the stance and stature of images ten times their size. Similarly, the deceptively intimate scale of “Yellow Flower”, “Blue Mountains” and “Fall Mountains” is equally arresting. Meanwhile the shocking blue trees in a larger canvas such as “West 14103” become mesmerizingly huge when rendered next to the curiously abstract hillside cascading off into the distance. Here, the organic shapes progressing to the right have a geometric and logical quality that suggests all natural forms are based on only a few basic ratios, which indeed they are. Their formation could in fact be a tunnel, or stacked buildings, or Precambrian rocks, which is exactly the source of their ambiguous charm. Our eyes can linger on them without any pressure to adjust our gaze into a forced conclusion and so the landscape, it seems, is dreaming us. Or the portrait is gazing at us. Or the still life is talking to us. Whatever their theme or format, one thing remains common to each painting: they all magically convey the palpable breath of light. 2 PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN 1368-W oil on wood panel, 14 x 12 in. 3 PASSAGES 1440 oil on canvas, 38 x 60 in. 4 WEST 14103 oil on canvas, 38 x 60 in. 5 OCTOBER LIGHT 1361 oil on canvas, 38 x 80 in. 6 MAKRINITSA 0839 oil on canvas, 38 x 60 in. 7 WINDOW 1491 oil on canvas, 38 x 30 in. 8 NONA 1345-W 9 NONA 1420-W 10 NONA 1350-W oil on wood panel, 12 x 12 in. oil on wood panel, 14 x 12 in. oil on wood panel, 14 x 12 in. 11 NONA 1346-W 12 NONA 1349-W 13 NONA 1472-W oil on wood panel, 12 x 12 in. oil on wood panel, 14 x 12 in. oil on wood panel, 14 x 12 in. 7 WINDOW 1491 oil on canvas, 38 x 30 in. 14 PASSAGES 1438 oil on canvas, 38 x 76 in. 15 DAWN TO DUSK 1205 oil on canvas, 50 x 152 in. 16 PASSAGES 1426 oil on canvas, 38 x 60 in. 16 PASSAGES 1426 oil on canvas, 38 x 60 in. 17 PASSAGES 1493 oil on canvas, 38 x 80 in. YEHOUDA CHAKI IN CONVERSATION WITH CLARENCE EPSTEIN CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY, MONTREAL CE: You’ve been working with Odon Wagner for more than 25 years. Your last exhibition at his gallery was in 2011. Is there a particular leitmotif to your current work? YC: Four years ago we organized a show here spanning three decades of my production. We had selected a range of pieces from my studio holdings. In preparing for this one, we realized that despite the fact that all the works are recently created, in terms of the relationship to my corpus of works, each one is, in a sense, retrospective. CE: As I understand it, over sixty years, you’ve developed and refined a distinctive “Chaki” language. YC: You could say that. My practice is far from linear. New figures reveal themselves and past ones reappear and disappear. The landscape, still life, portrait and nude while they recur as classic subjects, continue to evolve in my mind and on the canvas. CE: So you are partial to certain subjects but you regularly introduce new vocabulary, much like an encyclopedia in perpetual revision. YC: Of all the works that I’ve created, I can’t say that any one has emerged from a purely blank surface nor is any piece ever truly finished. Each is part of a much larger continuum of personal and evolving moments. CE: Often the term “retrospective” is used in museum and gallery shows to suggest a completed oeuvre. Do you see yourself winding down? YC: I’m in my studio six days a week. I have enough upcoming exhibitions, projects and commissions to keep me going for years. I’ve never been more productive in my life. CE: When I walk into your studio, I can’t help but notice the mementos, clippings and photos that compete with the bookshelves, cabinets, canvases, paint tubes and brushes. And yet everything seems to belong there. YC: You got it. The studio is an extension of who I am. There’s no other place in the world that I would rather be.