An enormous catalog of literary, theater and film works has become a prime conduit in our grasp and memory of the Holocaust. As the catalog expands, it increasingly underscores the contrast between the hardships it depicts and the comforts enjoyed by present readers and viewers. Still, Holocaust-themed productions rarely address judiciously the aesthetic/moral dilemmas implicated by every representation of this event. Primo Levi and Claude Lanzmann are among the few who cope head-on with such hurdles. While weaving the forthright testimony of survivors into their narratives, they deliberately eschew melodrama and poetic hyperbole in order to emphasize the duty not to manipulate the public’s sensibilities into shame, pity or terror. Levi and Lanzmann demonstrate unique approaches that are as restrained as they are effective, but these have been hard to follow by second and third generation authors, children of our long-lived Pax Americana, where the threat of extreme horror becomes a curiosity in the realm of entertainment.

Painters have fared poorly when it comes to addressing the Holocaust, yet for other reasons: not for trying too hard, but mostly for not trying enough. While painting has long been an eloquent mediator in our exchanges with death —from the Fayoum funerary portraits of ancient Egypt to Rothko’s late black abstractions— the near total omission of the Holocaust in post-war painting may be read as a sign of respectful trepidation before too compelling a subject. But such scarcity also can be blamed on the modernist posture that propelled abstract expressionist and minimal art by privileging the “presence” of an artwork at the expense of its representational content. Within that framework, any serious attempt at making the horrors of Auschwitz “present” on a canvas would have ended up being artistically suspect, even pathetic or pitiful. This constraint could only be dropped when, towards the end of the last century, the repudiation of modernist priorities became requisite in the artworld, and for a number of painters it became imperative to renege altogether on the quest for pictorial presence.

While the possibilities for picturemaking opened up, the Holocaust as a subject for painting remained, literally, at arms length. A case in point: Luc Tuymans’ paintings of concentration camps from the late 1980s and ’90s are vague and presence-less by design. While Tuymans’ daring originality was critically celebrated from the outset, the curators of his recent retrospective at San Francisco MOMA seemed concerned about the public’s response to these tactically distancing pictures, at least enough to insist in their wall text that “the viewer is unlikely to come away with a better understanding of the atrocities that the [Holocaust] encompasses, [which] reflects Tuymans’ larger point—that certain events defy representation.”

The commendation of Tuymans’ paintings as demonstrations of a dispassionate detachment in the face of the unfathomable may have been meant to recall Wittgenstein’s famous closing proposition for his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus of 1921: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent.” Granted, paintings are by definition silent, but a painting’s silence need not be confined to the numb estrangement postulated by Tuymans’ curators in San Francisco. Consider a certain sampling of still-life painting—such as in Claesz, Chardin and Morandi—where the invocation of silence is anything but empty; or the mute- yet-passionate abstract masterpieces of Mondrian, Rothko and Reinhardt. Indeed, one of painting’s more notorious attributes is that of making silence speak.

In my Prussian Blue series, I address the Holocaust in painting by seeking to generate the pictorial impression of a silence as solemn and forthright as it is eloquent, thus furnishing an alternative to the fatalistic strictures that have stifled the production of works dealing with this subject. As source material, I have gathered a number of photographs of gas chambers at different concentration camps. Some are period pictures taken after the end of the war; some others were taken after the camps had been turned into memorials and open to visitors. I deliberately have restricted myself to using three types of coloring materials that each have a direct, non-metaphorical relationship to the genocide:

Prussian blue paint: The Zyklon B product that was used as a killing agent from 1940 through 1945 often produced blue stains on the walls of the gas chambers by way of a chemical reaction with the brick and mortar. Such stains are still very much apparent in the structures at Majdanek. The cyanide-iron compound of these stains is chemically identical to the painter’s pigment known as Prussian Blue.
Pumice or Diatomaceous Earth: The cans of Zyklon B contained prussic acid that had been infused into pellets of a porous silica-based material, such as diatomite or pumice. The pellets were the medium that delivered the gas into the sealed-off halls. I utilize a powder made of these materials as an inert translucent filler in a medium that imparts the appearance of a slightly muddy vapor.
Flesh color paints: I’ve selected paints labeled as Flesh tone, Flesh tint, Blush, etc. that are conventionally used by painters for rendering skin tones. These make direct reference to the thousands of men, women and children who were murdered within the spaces I depict, where the evidence of the flesh that is absent from the scenes remains in the hues that permeate them.

The images and materials I’ve chosen reverberate with grueling associations that confront our imagination of the Holocaust. For me, as each painting slowly and reluctantly comes together in the studio—through underpainting and overpainting; trials, corrections and rectifications; building up and scraping off; modulations and glazes—a visible corroboration emerges. Coping with the painting’s pictorial density requires coping with the scene’s implications. I hope that the friction of my mark-making and the images’ inherent significance resonate in a viewer’s apprehension of my paintings.

Much like Levi and Lanzmann, I desire to eliminate (or at least minimize) metaphor as my works’ signifying conduit. The unmannered directness of the photographs, the intrinsic linkage of the coloring materials with the gas chambers, and my efforts at merging these ingredients into effective artworks— these are the design elements in the Prussian Blue series intended to spark off painting’s evocative powers .

My purpose is not moralistic; I do not aim at enlightening or educating others about the Holocaust. Much less are my paintings prosthetic devices. Still, I intend to elicit actual feelings, not just point to them. So, if my works produce an emotional response, it is not because they simulate the horror of being in the concentration camps (they don’t), or because they demand pity for the victims (they don’t), but because they trigger what the sheer awareness of the Holocaust feels like. This shared sensation is the communal lifeline of the memory. Someone who never had this particular feeling will not learn it from my paintings. But someone who undergoes this feeling as a response to a painting for the first time might learn something about the often misunderstood representational and aesthetic powers of painting. The evocative sense of grief and bafflement in my paintings is compounded by their pictorial presence and what they represent, by the thrust of the paintings’ poignant silence and our empathetic speechlessness before the memory of the millions killed.
Yishai Jusidman
Los Angeles, October 2011

“Disputes about beauty might perhaps be involved in less confusion, if a distinction were established, which certainly exists, between such objects as are beautiful, and such as are picturesque—between those, which please the eye in their natural state; and those, which please from some quality, capable of being illustrated in painting.”
—William Galpin, On Picturesque Beauty, 1792“ ‘Need I now explain,’ interrupted Mr. Hamilton, ‘why an object peculiarly and strikingly ugly, is picturesque? Were this figure, just as you saw him, to be expressed by a painter with exactness and spirit, would you not be struck with it, as you were just now in nature, and from the same reasons? What indeed is the object of an artist, in whatever art? Not merely to represent the soft, the elegant, or the dignified and majestic; his point is to fix the attention; if he cannot by grandeur or beauty, he will try to do it by deformity: and indeed, according to Erasmus, ‘quae natura deformia sunt, plus habent et artis et voluptatis in tabula.’”
—Uvedale Price, A Dialogue on the Distinct Characters of the Picturesque and the Beautiful, 1801

The images in Yishai Jusidman’s newest series come from media thumbnail prints lifted from the “The World this Week” section in The Economist magazine. For a few years now, he says, his selected imagery has rested solely on his own speculation that certain pictorial aspects of the 1.5 x 1.5 inch photograph may bring about a good painting. Since there is no escape from the associations generated by what is illustrated in the pictures, from the Paris Riots to Mexicans crossing the Rio Grande, the fleeting drama of everyday events is seized and clutched in Jusidman’s painstakingly rendered works. Yet also in them, the transient quality of news images is collapsed into the timeless quality of painting, where we might find snippets of Caravaggio, Corot, Monet, Friedrich, as well as an implicit wink to newsprint inspired painters such as Warhol and Richter. Thus, instead of foregrounding a politicized agenda, Jusidman aims to subjugate politically minded art to his own aesthetic terms.
The pieces in The Economist Shuffle are layered concoctions of mediation and information calculated to activate “an abrasive merging of otherwise incompatible predispositions in the viewer.” The artist refers, of course, to the age-old artistic dichotomy of purposiveness/aestheticism. The purposive aspect of these paintings derives from the artist’s deliberate sourcing of the images, and the aestheticist aspect is articulated by their softened oil and egg tempera technique. Gilded frames in turn crown the display by giving a purpose —as in commercial packaging—to their aestheticism, while further aesthetizing the pictures’ purposiveness.

Dear ___________,
I found the old letters—read them through and remain somewhat puzzled. They remind me of today’s form letters that demonstrate a certain sophistication and are adopted by the corporate lackey to provide others with an apology, a rejection, a reminder; or by the illiterate looking for proof that the passage of time will not erase their voices. I’d like to know if these letters ever expressed personal passions or were always meant as conventional molds to be filled out by others. I wonder if, at the time that they were written, the author suspected that her own presence would not remain concealed, that her services would carry forth multiple vestiges of ulterior meanings. I ask myself, finally, about the emotions that fail to be conveyed by the scribe’s formulaic wording. Perhaps what’s most sincere about these letters is that which remains beyond the confines of the text, like the blotches that accidentally fall onto the floor when the painter subjects a canvas to his or her whims; the residual stains of a presence that remains palpable, like a ghost rattling the chains of human intuition.
Eagerly awaiting news from you,
Pamela
—Pamela Echeverría, 2008

Modernist critics glorify “literalness” as the bearer of truth in the plastic arts, complemented by the idea that literature in painting—literary painting—detracts from the supposedly progressive drive toward literalness. My paintings on carpeting in Models incorporate texts from letters in old epistolary manuals, the sort that began to circulate in Europe in the sixteenth century. The letters I selected resort to outmoded forms of address that, once recontextualized in paint, point to diverse modes of responsiveness that paintings can provoke in their viewers. The epistolary form exploits devices and conventions so that specific relations may take place with specific readers. A letter may be soliciting, conciliatory, complaining, thankful, clarifying, threatening, and so forth. Painters also make use of particular technical and contextualizing strategies in order to involve the viewer in specific ways—seducing (Vermeer), confronting (Bacon), questioning (Manet), notifying (Stella), or proposing (Morandi). The analogy ends where the message of the letter rests on the acknowledged use of a rigid convention, while the effect of a worthy painting makes convention a malleable and fluid medium that playfully generates a slippery exchange with the viewer.
—Yishai Jusidman

I sense these still lifes are self-portraits. Lone, forlorn cups or bowls, gussied up after a hard day’s labor, float in milky, ambiguous spaces. Sometimes, the cups and bowls embrace, in pairs and groups along with a rag or a brush, or stand apart, as if ready for battle. Paint splotches, smears, smudges, drips, and daubs cover all the paintings. But such marks also exist in a world outside the paintings, as details of the artist’s Working Painters and Models series, themselves paintings with, or on carpets that hang from the wall and stretch into the space on which we, the viewer, stand and stare. Are the painted marks in these still lifes elegiac representations of marks previously soaked up by the works they depict? Or do they refer to nothing beyond themselves, as the mere residue of the work of representation? It really doesn’t matter, for here the real, the represented, and the residue that results all come so close as if almost to touch. In two of the eleven paintings, valedictions appear: “Very truly yours,” or “Yours, Love.” The artist addresses us politely, but what remains from the epistolary messages is that moment when the artist bids us farewell. No doubt a sly reference to the spent belief that the author is dead (or dying), it also suggests time hereafter. For an uncanny firmament remains in the place of the artist’s name —a self-centered, if subtle attempt at immortality.
—Gary Kornblau,
Los Angeles, 2008

On one hand, Stills evolves from my preoccupation with painting what already exists in paint, as did my earlier landscapes and portraits of clowns and geishas; on the other hand, it elaborates on my inquiry into the boundaries separating real from pictorial space. My concern is not the one that drove Rauschenberg to bridge “the gap between art and life,” but rather to test the scope of such a gap. My strategy is to bring into the realm of the picture the carpeting extensions that I earlier used as framing devices to establish and guide the transition from actual to virtual space. My stained, furry “frames” are brought into the picture to become Morandi-inspired still lives. Paint merely represents paint and articulates space, as it does, out of traces, stains, spills, and drops.
—Yishai Jusidman

In Working Painters, the spectator stands on the very same surface Jusidman stood on when making the portraits (the stains on the carpeting attest to it), so the spectator is brought right into the artist’s territory. The painter whom Jusidman portrays contemplates his or her canvas; a kind of mirror image of our observing Jusidman’s work. This mirroring, however, lacks perceptual symmetry, since the portrayed painters, just like Velázquez’s Venus, never look back at the spectator. The painter’s doubled gazes cross mid-way between the spectator and the diptych, implicating an absent canvas at the center of the portrayed painter’s attention. As for ourselves, our attention oscillates between what we are looking at and what we are looking for (namely, what the portrayed painter would be looking at). This mental oscillation between contemplation, self-criticism, and imagining the possible is exactly what a painter undergoes when immersed in the process of making a work of art.
—Eva Wittocx, Painting at Work, 2001

Working Painters is a series of portraits on the subject of painterly attentiveness. I want to differentiate painterly attentiveness from Romantic aestheticized contemplation and from Modernist self-referentiality. Inducing poetic sleepwalking or conjuring pseudo-scientific necessity should not be mistaken for securing the spectator’s meditative involvement. In order to dissipate the specter of Romanticism, my paired portraits disrupt all attempts by the viewer at centering the composition, thereby frustrating the fixed attention of the contemplative stare. Furthermore, the image-pairs suggest stereoscopic vision, yet refuse to blend into a stereoscopic effect, thus “flattening” the pictorial space without bowing to Modernist strictures against figuration. Of course, flatness here is not absolute, as monochrome painting would have it, but rhetorical. Flat space, after all, is an oxymoron. To hollow out a Modernist roadblock, I choose to articulate pictorial space as neither flat nor deep, or perhaps we should say, both flat and deep.
—Yishai Jusidman

Elaborate, analytical, and ambitious, the mutatis mutandis series weaves together various strands of Jusidman’s previous production to reemphasize the conceptual foundation of his overall project. Here, Jusidman has postulated a machine for viewing, a controlled environment for the examination of charged and ambiguous models. This approach to artmaking may be Duchampian to the extent that attention is paid to how we see, to the conditions of visuality. Where it diverges from Duchamp is that what we see is not given short shrift by either arbitrariness in the choice of subject or undeserved metaphoric weight by virtue of poetic juxtaposition. Quite the contrary, mutatis mutandis is a precisely formulated and expansive visual argument. It is clean and incisive, yet allows enough space for aesthetic pleasure and the play of imagination.
—Richard Kalina, Constructing the Observed, 2001

The all-embracing imagery that is churned out by mass media overwhelms our lives with distraction and fantasy, or, as a reaction, disenchantment and skepticism. Painting is not an either/or proposition; it has long thrived where fantasy and skepticism simultaneously hold each other in check. The effect of the paintings in mutatis mutandis lies in matters of presence and absence, in the harmonies and dissonances between a painting and its referent, where the referred entity may be composed of either flesh or pigment. I have manipulated object-based and technology-based elements so as to call attention to the painterly effect, by placing the tactile against the optical, the literal against the metaphorical, phenomena against discourse. In these works, I attempt to re-articulate the ageless wonder and thought-nurturing regard of painting — both with and without paint.
—Yishai Jusidman

To spend any time at all with Jusidman’s series of disproportionate diptychs is to be convinced that he has spent a lot more time doing just what you are: staring at the people in his pictures, in an honest attempt to discern just what they might be seeing. By locating himself alongside every other viewer, the painter transforms the hallowed, old-fashioned triumvirate of artist-painting-viewer (i. e., creator-creation-interpreter) into a less godlike and more flexible setup, in which meaning does not originate from a single high point and only gradually makes its way down to lowly viewers. In the more contemporary, less predictable, and increasingly risky arrangement staged by these works, each painting hovers inaccessibly above both artist and viewer, neither of whom is in any better position to know the truth of the matter. Art no longer stands in as an inadequate translation of idealized intentions. Instead, it is simply another part of the visible world, whose often confounding and sometimes strangely alien character is a matter to be confronted by anyone sufficiently curious about reality’s slippery nature, and knowledge’s imperfect grasp of it.
David Pagel, Out of the Picture, 1999

Looking, categorizing, and describing are discreet yet interdependent operations. While we may be used to sliding effortlessly from one to the other, their interrelationships become apparent in the painter’s practice, as well as in the interpretation of paintings—or at least of some of them. I would wish that viewers approach these diptychs via the relations woven between the minutely rendered and reserved presence of the portrayed patients, the clinical information that we have of them, and the paintings reproduced in the books they chose to sit with. My transcription of the patients’ photographs into paint separates us further from the sitters, but also arouses our interest in the outcome. The paintings reproduced in books are returned to their previous material state, in spite of the fact that they come to be at an even greater remove from their sources. The accompanying tablets bearing the patients’ clinical diagnoses are paintings—and while their materiality does not affect their textual content, it refashions our perception. All of these shifts echo each other and, I hope, lead to a complex network of possible readings, keeping the viewer engaged in an endless to-and-fro.
—Yishai Jusidman

Assuming a model that would have charmed Édouard Manet, the Sumo wrestlers here are used as morphemes ready to adopt any mask and meticulously act out the relativity of their fictions. Jusidman invokes a wide historical repertoire of visual languages and demonstrates an unconcealed ability to seduce visually. His examination of the syntax of modern painting also makes explicit complex interrelations among representational strategies. These paintings’ stylistic transgressions are controlled with sober elegance through a brilliant alibi, whereby style is not merely quoted but undertaken from within. They reveal a preference for (re)presenting the type of pictorial debate that emanates from an analytical engagement with the construction of form. The oppositions played out refer to geometrical principles of composition—as battles between figure and ground, modeling and flatness, vibration and monochromy. The Sumo series cynically questions its own auratic façade, allowing in its fragile conventionality a glimpse of the imminent collapse of illusionism onto the support itself.
—Osvaldo Sánchez, Sumo, 1997

By laying out the parameters of the fight, the strict rules of Sumo wrestling enhance the appreciation of the wrestlers’ force. This force is constrained by the ways in which it is allowed to flow; the small circular area where the fight takes place holds in check the potentially dangerous behavior of the wrestlers. Thus, the notion of force in Sumo wrestling is a function of bringing together in the most efficient manner physical prow ess and acknowledged restraint. The wrestling agents in my Sumo paintings are not the depicted characters, but the categories through which we’ve conventionally come to catalogue paintings. My idea is to set the painting into plastic motion through the clashing of categories, in a way that the viewer’s attention alternates between one and the other. If force is contained, this is so the outcome of the fight might be decided through the participation of the spectator, who becomes, in turn, the decisive fighter in the ring.
—Yishai Jusidman

Is there still a chance for visual narrative to prevail through the tricks of pigment? The first time I saw Jusidman’s Geisha paintings, I realized that the answer is yes. My surprise was all the greater because I had already heard how the paintings work, which only goes to show the difference between knowing how a thing will look and actually seeing it. At first I didn’t even identify them as pictures: They appeared as a set of white quadrangles against the wall, like virgin canvases. (I can’t help smiling at such a metaphor of visual chastity.) Only after a while did my pupils dilate and my eyes adapt enough to detect the subtle variations of white as the stylized profiles, vacant stares, and frozen gesticulations of geisha girls swam up to me. So far one might think Magic Pictures!—note the trick, applaud the illusion, drop a coin, and leave. But here’s the difference: Once revealed, Jusidman’s paintings set up a conflict between the qualities of their content. The viewer drifts from the shock of access into an ambiguous emotional state as diffuse as the undifferentiated blankness of the first few seconds. Genuine or otherwise, these geishas are the illusion of an illusion.
—Cuauhtémoc Medina,
The Spectator’s Dictatorship, 1995

The Geisha paintings continue my exploration of the meeting of flesh and pigment on the picture plane, yet this time in relation to the phenomenon of painterly seduction. I address these works primarily to the sophisticate who has become accustomed to monochrome painting. Even though it has been an extremely powerful and coveted device throughout the history of art, painterly seductiveness often has been regarded with a great deal of suspicion by the avant-garde, to the extent that to say that a painting is seductive is to say that it is deceptive. However, the fact that paintings can be seductive is one of the reasons why they are unique among objects of desire. One doesn’t fall for a painting if from the outset one doesn’t want to, nor would one if the painting desists from soliciting one’s attention in the first place. By understanding seduction as complicity between a capable seducing agent and the will of the seduced, painterly seductiveness remains a path through which paintings can generate and sustain lasting relationships with willing individuals.
—Yishai Jusidman

For centuries, clowns have been used to ruefully represent the role of the artist in society; a tragicomic court jester, engaged to amuse the passing fancies of a ruling elite and, almost as a consolation prize, given license to publicly ridicule the very institutions that support him. Jusidman’s clowns do just that, portraying with carefully wrought, even Old Masterish skill a broad range of expressive emotions. The tight, dramatic cropping of his images, however, strategically limits the picture of each clown’s colorfully articulated face. It underscores the wide-eyed smile and narrow frown as merely painted surfaces. Clowns may appear to be jolly or poignant, escapist or crazed. But, even as we are mesmerized by their engaging antics, they are also always slightly creepy. Jusidman’s clowns draw a pointed parallel to artists today, almost as a multidimensional corrective for an era that blithely casts them in black-and-white terms as either sinners or saints.
—Christopher Knight, “Going Beyond the Face Value
of Clowns,” Los Angeles Times, February 18, 1997

The mind of the beholder also contains both art histories and personal histories that dictate our predispositions and expectations in regards to artworks. I cannot remain indifferent to the Venetian technique purposefully exploited here, nor to the degraded practice of painting clowns. But I do not wish to stage just a stylized meeting of high art and low art. I hope to emphasize the lowliness of the low as well as the heights of the high by contrasting formal and thematic features that cannot be experientially separated from each other. These paintings are intended to bring about complex reactions, concurrently attraction and repulsion, and hopefully a sense of detached satisfaction in sorting out one’s own predispositions. Here again, the effects of the paintings are not private feelings but public responses, which I hope can be dissected while retaining their vitality.
—Yishai Jusidman