Icons of Loss: Samuel Bak

'Viewers joining the six-decade-long journey of Samuel Bak’s works, as presented in this exhibition, are presented with a multi-faceted experience – an encounter with an artist dealing head-on with the basic question of “how” underlying the language of art, with an artist debating with himself about the abstract, the figurative and the gamut between them. His varying stylistic periods reveal an artist capable of producing fine pencil drawings in the classical tradition, on the one hand, and thick, layered oil brushstrokes of pasticcio color on large canvasses. Every period reveals a little – the configurative response of the artist’s journey in a sea of expressive artistic possibilities – but conceals twice as much about the inner burden. Thus until the decisive juncture, where artistic expression and inner truth meet. The journey and burden are shaped into a single identity, which, while it may be paradigmatic, is nevertheless unique and private - the arduous road of Samuel Bak spanning sixty years of creativity.'

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Zbigniew Preisner - Labirynt.

Small pebbles on the graves of the dead

Francine Mayran has been exhibiting her paintings and sculptures since 1999. Her artistic work of memory on the Holocaust has developed in parallel since 2008:

'She thinks that painting imposed itself as an imperative, to serve the transmission of an intransmissible genocide, the one of men, women and children, whose only crime was to be Jewish or Gypsy, or in 1915 Armenian, or in 1975 Cambodian or Tutsi in Rwanda in 1994.

She says, as the American painter Samuel Bak, "I didn’t choose the Shoah, but the Shoah chose me to become one of its bearers of testimony".

Her aim is to connect photos and objective evidence of the past, and to link them through a personal pictorial creation, as in a line of descent, so that these images remain and live on and so that through painting, they become moments of the present.

She tries as a bearer of memory, to take over from the memory of the last direct witnesses, who little by little pass away.

Her creations also try to be echo of other memories, those of the Gypsies, those of the homosexuals, those of the resistants deported because of their ideas,as well as those of the handicapped persons.

As the artist says: “To speak, to write, to paint are small pebbles on the graves of the dead, words of support to survivors to allow them to leave their burden of guilt and responsibility and pass on their message.”'

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Yaakov Shwekel - Shema Yisroel.