Happening

The artwork "Happening" is a monochrome black-and-white print (14.8 х 18.4 cm), where the author depicts three individuals on a horizontal grey speckled surface. In the middle of the composition is a chair with a white frame, black seat, and curved front legs. A person is seated on it, with their back to the viewer. Their bare feet are crossed downwards, with the heels raised upwards. The person sits facing the back of the chair. The upper part of the backrest is "separated" from the figures by a black vertical strip with "clearings" near the left and right edges of the print. The person's arms are bent at the elbows and spread apart. She is dressed in a short black blouse with short sleeves and light-coloured underwear. The person's head is covered with a white-grey "cape" with a shapeless, sprawling accumulation at the top against the background of a light vertical plane with dense, wavy black lines. To the left of her, positioned one-third to the right, a naked man in a wide-brimmed grey hat stands on the black stump of his left leg. His gaze is directed at the seated person. With his right arm outstretched, he supports the bent knee of the raised bare right leg. To the right of the seated person stands a half-naked woman, positioned two-thirds to the left. She has an elongated elderly face, a long nose and a high hairstyle. On her shoulders, the author reproduced a striped black-and-white band, likely fabric. The woman's black pants lack the right leg, while the left leg of the pants is depicted in a light horizontal stripe. Her bare feet are pressed together. The left forearm is not shown, and the right arm is not visible. In front of the chair is the sign "Рі", the author's monogram.

"Igor Podolchak is a young Ukranian artist who has come into maturity as most of the political emblems of Soviet communism have been dismantled. To 'western' eyes adjusting in the light of Glasnost these grimly comic tableaux of Podolchak's appear to be macabre residues of an unconscious history. The artist recovers these repressed memories in a pictorial language that combines Surrealist effrontery with a neo-Gothic repertoire of demons, fools and hellish tormentors. In what could be private and dark corners of – equally – some torture chamber in a remote castle, some diabolical clinic operated by a vivisector, or some maniacally disciplinarian school room, these creatures perform obscure but intensely cruel rituals upon each other and upon themselves.

They are inextricably bound to a fantastic machinery that could be derived from Dr Frankenstein's laboratory, the Marquis de Sade's chateau or Franz Kafka's penal colony. Their limbs and organs fall away to reveal grotesquely implausible prosthetic devices that accentuate their mutilations. Their flesh is torn away in strips like bondage straps, or it drips off them, coagulates like glue on the walls and floors, or is petrified as stone or as an abominable excretion.

Alluding to the monstrosities of Hieronymus Bosch, Otto Dix, Max Ernst and Salvador Dali, Podolchak invokes a violently sensual and perverse force of metamorphosis. A kind of hysteria grips the imagery in this sarcastic fantasy: an ambiguous condition since it requires both intensity and also distraction. Because of this ambiguity we might confuse hysteria with ecstasy: psychoanalysts suggest that where hysteria is an illness, ecstasy is considered a state of grace. For an artist sensitive to this underlying similarity, hysteria can be regarded as the obscene side of ecstasy. These creatures are obscene not only because they strain or lurch comically and horrifically in spastic poses; in the perpetual torment of their inescapable hermetic society, they also cripple our own sense of moral distinction and judgement – conflating the worlds of the living and the dead, victim and master, the saved and the damned.

Their flesh convulses in the rigid grip of desire locked onto repression: whose erotic machines (manufactured from mysterious quasi-religious and political signs) weigh down, enclose, constrain, contort the lust of their supplicants.

In their Gothic guise these sorts of grotesqueries represented human depravities given their apocalyptic form, that is to say their true form behind appearance, the revelation of otherwise hidden human sin as it will appear on the Judgement Day. Are Podolchak's visions in this fantastic space of repression likewise apocalyptic, though perhaps signalling a political dread of Orwellian nightmares becoming ecstatic?" (Edward Colless, "Essay". To the exhibition catalogue "Igor Podolchak. Ukrainian Printmaker", 1991).

https://eprints.utas.edu.au/18624/1/Igor_Podolchak_Ukrainian_printmaker_1991.pdf

Below the print is an inscription in pencil from left to right: "'Happening' etching 10/25 Podolchak 1984".

Borys Voznytskyi Lviv National Art Gallery