Masturbation or Idola Fori

The work is a rectangular print (16.5 х 10.8 cm) of vertical orientation with a female figure and a crucifixion depicted in the centre. The anthropomorphic cross is tilted, supported by a trunk that branches in the upper part, where it meets the cross. The junction of the cross and the support trunk is covered with light-coloured fabric, which falls and flutters. In the print's lower part, a profile image of a nude woman moving vertically up the beam of the cross is dominant. With her left hand, she holds onto an erect penis that is a part of the cross. Only the left part of her body is fully visible: facial features, a bald head, a leg, and a chest. The head and lower part of the female body appear disproportionately large compared to the torso. The woman is portrayed in motion, allowing partial visibility of her somewhat asymmetrical right leg, raised and bent at the knee. The image composition is conventionally divided into two parts with an achromatic palette. The upper part of a light hue is filled with various cross stylisations and geometric figure outlines. The lower part of the image is dark, with tears on the dark background surface, around the female figure, the cross, and the support trunk.

"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: "'Mastrubation or Idola Fori' etching A/P Podolchak 1986".

Borys Voznytskyi Lviv National Art Gallery