Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
The significance of the candle falters and the divine light dims, however, in the shadows cast by murderous world wars and numerous genocidal campaigns. This leads us to ask: what ritual of memorialization can possibly befit those who died in this way? How can one possibly illuminate the darkness cast by those deaths? And, how do we address the destructive nature of flames, manifested in the Greek etymology of the word Holocaust, in which holos means "whole" and austos denotes "burn," and by which everything is reduced to ash?
In his enlightening essay, Lawrence L. Langer guides us through the ritual of remembering the Holocaust through Samuel Bak's paintings.
Synopsis
In the art of Samuel Bak, familiar objects fracture before our eyes, abandoning their traditional functions to become metaphors for a dissonant, broken world. Inhabitants of a surrealistic space, Bak's candles are abused, damaged, melting, lifeless, and bathed in the somber afterglow of profound sorrow. The cylindrical candles morph into tree trunks, logs, chimneys, columns, missiles, and other projectiles, exposing the frequent disorder at the heart of the supposed orderly progression of history. An icon of memory becomes a ruse, where the flames of remembrance mingle with the drifting smoke of extermination. Amidst the anguish of his paintings, however, Bak allows for the notion that life can rise anew from the ashes.
In his enlightening essay, Lawrence L. Langer guides us through the ritual of remembering the Holocaust through Bak's paintings, familiarizing the viewer with a past that may feel abstract to many of us. While Bak's
paintings provide an entry point into the reality of the Shoah that our modern consciousness struggles to confront, Langer's words explicate the historical, religious, and cultural narratives that inform the artwork.