SAMUEL BAK

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SAMUEL BAK
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Elegy
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Ongoing Journey
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From a city that is afloat to a ship made of
stones. Here the sky is more luminous. The war
may be over the massive ocean-liner-fortress
seems ready for departure, perhaps a departure to
a Promised Land. Who inhabits this structure?
On its deck are objects that suggest the plight
of having survived. A few unearthly tablets, a
reminder of God's broken covenant with His
people. Two smoking stacks emerge from the ship.
I know that they emerge from what lies buried in
many a soul.
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In order to establish distance I chose to give my
paintings an aspect of timelessness. Distance
permits one to overcome misgivings, to touch what
a reluctant viewer's soul considers untouchable,
to speak about the unspeakable.
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Smoke, Cemeteries float in the sky. Europe's
skies carry the ashes of an assassinated people
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Gravestones recall shapes of the tablets of the
law.
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Here the subject is the breaking God's covenant
with Israel. It raises the "question of
questions." Where was He? Of course, no art could
pretend to give an answer to a question of this
kind. It is for the viewer to ponder. The number
six stands for the sixth commandment -- "Thou
shall not murder" -- and for the six millions.
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Hebrew letters that spell SHEMA ISRAEL, a
proclamation that religious Jews are supposed to
cry out at the moment of their death, lie
crumbled at the base of a huge heap of tablets
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Two Yods as part of a broken key. A key is a tool
that opens what is locked, an instrument of
interrogation. Metaphorically, it continues to
expose the enigma of God's presence, or of His
absence. The house is being protected, or
crushed by a heavy load
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In this second panel the Hebrew Shin of Shadday,
God's feminine attribute, re-proposes the same
query. Here, where the light is brighter, the
broken key forms the shape of a "zero" that might
suggest emptiness or abandonment
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To me the boy from Warsaw is the Jewish
Crucifixion. In the Vilna Ghetto I was his age
and I looked exactly like him.
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The Family
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The Family
The Family is a painting that I have dedicated to
the memory of the perished members of my family.
An explanation of this work would be beyond the
limit of my present time, so let me go on with
the outline of my biography. During most of my
last four decades, I have been indeed a wandering
Jew. I have lived and worked in Tel Aviv, Paris,
Rome, and Lausanne, and I presently reside in the
US, in Boston. I have become a man who is at home
everywhere and nowhere, an artist whose real
roots are in the ground of his art. As I said
earlier, and it may sound trite, I know that what
I have been painting comes from a compulsive need
to give meaning to the miraculous fact of my
survival. It tries to appease a sad sense of
bewilderment. It comes from the fear that in a
world of unparalleled upheavals, things are never
what they seem. My work reveals a reality
observed through the eyes of a child who had
suddenly aged. Some might call it elaboration of
Trauma I hope that my art is more than that.. 
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The recently published monograph on my art, which
covers over fifty years of painting, has this
image on its jacket. If I had to define my art's
language or style, I would situate it in a realm
of allegory and metaphor..
Close Up
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Devastated landscapes of ancient cities and urban
constructions seem to have been made of a child's
building blocks.
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Figures are half-alive and half-contrived of
bizarre prostheses. Abused angels stand
helpless. 
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Chess pieces are involved in games without rules
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A revolution has wiped out kings, knights and
bishops. It has installed an equality of
imperfections
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THE FRUIT OF KNOWLEDGE
"As a child, I had a feeling that if Adam gave up
Paradise in order to taste the fruit that would
give knowledge and a capacity to distinguish
between good and evil, it must have been a pear.
I felt that an apple, which in my childhood
memories was usually something very sour, had
nothing in common with the sensual, wonderful
taste of a pear" The pear thus stands as an
alternative symbol of the Fall of Man and all of
its ramifications the expulsion from Paradise
into the world of time, the origin of free will,
and the capacity to distinguish and choose
between good and evil.
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Huge fruit, mostly pears in various stages of
reinvention, pears made of stone, pears in the
form of hovering planets, pears giving birth to
other pears represent a shattered and bewildering
world, a universe that offers no explanations. At
times one can see in many of these paintings the
traces of a human effort to repair.
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Enactment
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Banishment
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  The ghetto. Here is an inclined surface with no
horizon and no possibility of escape. Indeed,
when we were thrown into the ghetto like human
garbage, it felt like being in a deep hole. This
hole is in the shape of the Star of David, the
emblem of the ghetto. Near it lies our badge of
identification.
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The texture of the painting tries to evoke the
stony indifference of the outer world. After the
liberation, when I revisited the ghetto, it stood
in ruins similar to the ones in the painting
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Here the title is "Alone." It is another
structure in the form of a Jewish star, an island
surrounded by a menacing sea. The painting's sky
sheds an ominous light.
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