Judah's Second Son and His Brother's Wife

In the foreground (print size – 10.3 х 14.1 cm), two naked people are seated opposite each other: a man and a woman leaning against the high back of a sofa. The frame of the sofa resembles the branches or roots of a tree. The man on the left is shown in profile to the right. His head is bald, with one large ear, and his eyes are fixed on the woman. The man's skin is wrinkled. The hand of his right arm, bent at the elbow, is clenched in a fist. His left white leg, bent at the knee, rests on the seat. The man's right black calf is lowered to the side of the seat. The torso of the woman seated on the right is shown in three-quarters reverse to the left. The woman's head is bald, with one large ear and wrinkled skin. She is looking at the man. The shins of her bent knees are lowered on opposite sides of the seat. The lower part of the woman's torso (white with black outlines) is framed by a rectangular frame with an inscription in the lower right corner: "EL'T". The background of the work is filled with different elements – signs: an arrow, a loop, arcs, and crosses. In the background is a wide horizontal black stripe above which, near the upper left corner, a white rectangle depicts a brush holding a bundle of curved lines. In the upper left corner is the inscription: "ELO".

"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: "'Judah's second son and his brother's wife' / 24/30 / Podolchak 1987".

Borys Voznytskyi Lviv National Art Gallery