Rodeo for Vilem Stransky

A monochrome black-and-white print (8.3 х 9.9 cm) with a speckled grey and black background. The composition features two figures, a man and a woman. Their bent forms are arranged in the shape of a diagonal cross. The half-naked man is turned upward, with the front of his body facing up. The longitudinal axis of his body extends from the upper left corner of the print, where his head is located, to the lower right corner, where his feet are. His face and gaze are directed upwards. A tied bundle of hair hangs down from the back of his head. The man is dressed in a black blouse that covers his upper shoulders and arms. In his left arm, stretched out in front of him, he holds a taut rope that extends from the woman's head. The figure of a naked bald woman without arms and legs is turned face down and turned to the right. The lower part of the woman passes between the man's thighs. The longitudinal axis of her body extends from the lower left corner of the print to the upper right corner, where her head is located. With his right arm freely hanging down, the man holds a foreign forearm, whose hand grasps the woman's calf.

"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: "'Rodeo for V.S.' etching 55/75 Podolchak 1987".

Borys Voznytskyi Lviv National Art Gallery