Confession

A monochrome black and white print (10 х 7.6 cm) depicting a confessional with two nude figures: a man on the left, inside the confessional, and a woman on the right. The confessional lacks a front wall; instead, there's a horizontal figurative lintel halfway up its height and a cornice in the form of two arches with spacers at the top. The right wall of the confessional has two openings: an upper one, resembling a window of ancient Iranian style, and a smaller lower one, reminiscent of an open book outline. The man sits inside the confessional on a small bench with a central leg split at the bottom. His right foot, bent at the knee, rests on the seat while the left leg hangs down. The man's right hand grasps his right shin. His head is bald, and his eyes are closed. The woman is kneeling by the right wall of the confessional. Her head is lowered, with her gaze directed through the slit window. The woman wears a high, grey hat rounded at the top and adorned with rows of black oval and round spots. Her left arm is extended into the confessional through the lower opening in the wall. Instead of the woman's feet, there is a small chipped stone. In the background, against the grey, mottled backdrop, there is a white bust-length silhouette of a person facing right in profile. Above their bent arm, a white symbol is shown.

"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: "'Confession' etching 23/25 Podolchak 1987".

Borys Voznytskyi Lviv National Art Gallery