Zvi Lachman: From a Work Journal

What is a portrait? A human and spiritual identity imprinted upon a face. A presence whose existence cannot be reduced to its tactile contours. More than any other object, it is the portrait that compels me to question this "presence." With every portrait I draw, I learn how to see. Each portrait is not only an object of observation-it also looks at me. What is this gaze, who is this eye that is not mine.

The eyes are the heart of this enigma. They have an immense magnetic power. What you face, what you stand against, what you withstand.

What I see is being distorted as I observe it. At times, the gaze conceals no less than it reveals. When I confront a face-especially a photograph of a face-it appears detached from circumstance, from background, from the poem left behind. It opens onto my own obsessions. No encounter between me and this face is possible unless it is refracted through the imagination. And yet in the course of this encounter I do not attempt to discover myself, but rather to get away from myself. I am looking for the unfamiliar, for the wonder that will liberate me from the photograph, from the mirror, from myself.

The face, for me, is "being." It exists as time. It appears as both the longest and the shortest duration, at once brief and prolonged. It is incessantly evolving. If I think of it as a ground upon which nature acts, then its alteration becomes action. Why paint the face? It is an attempt to explore this enigma, to follow the imperceptible movement between the outside and the inside. You try to touch this minute movement, to reach it, to study it, to approach.

The alteration of the face is only revealed to me through the act of painting. I perceive this change as a network of points. The flickering of certain points within the network captures the shifting of expressions. I thus search for those points in space that follow the change and reveal its limits. Rather than create a sculptural envelope of a face, I seek intersecting points of energy engaged in a flickering dynamic, which may be deciphered as different shapes.

There is seemingly nothing more familiar than a face. One is easily tempted to create a resemblance, to succumb to the need to trace and circumscribe. If only it were possible to draw closer, to capture what could have been a part of a body.
If we were to examine a series of skulls, the differences between them would be discernible in terms of their dimensions: wide, narrow, tall, short, protruding, sunk. Beyond these differences, however, we would have a hard time characterizing them. This is not the case when we look at a living face. The encounter with the other's face underscores his singularity. What is the relation between Everyman and the specific person sitting in front of me?

The drawing of a portrait involves two stages. First, I liberate the person from his or her specificity. I must sacrifice the surface, do away almost entirely with clothing, undress the face. Some of the signature features are negated, others are repressed. I try to reach the nakedness of "Everyman," of the whitened portrait, the ancient No mask. Only later do I return to search for specificity, for the subtle detail that creates an illusion of resemblance. If I responded immediately to the particular, to the sensual, to the historical, I would be unable to grasp the nakedness of "Everyman." This universal human quality is important to me.

The risk I take is the tremendous difficulty-sometimes bordering on impossibility-of attaining the specific. There is always the danger that the presence in front of you will chuckle to itself. You know that beyond the
dimension of the journey you have undertaken, there exist before you a nose-eyes-teeth-a mouth-capable of chuckling.

The observation of another human being leads me to search in myself for the face of the first man. When drawing a face, I experience the attempt to create a human being. Yet the more I try to infuse the face with life, the more I see the frozen, lifeless features beneath which the dead are revealed to us.

Charcoal, chalk and pencil are all means of encoding the real. On the one hand, I must repeatedly discover anew the particular code that will enable the mask to be broken, and which will uncover the face as movement. On the other hand, I entertain a dialogue with a tradition of portraiture (Fayum funerary paintings, Holbein, Rembrandt, Chardin, C?zanne, Giacometti, Bacon, Aurbach) that captures the singular detail by means of painterly abstraction.

Like others before me, I too am torn between my devotion to observation and my quest for what lies beyond it: the crack in the mask, the opening onto the invisible. Only when I finally feel that the face exists as "presence," can I return to pealing it away layer by layer, to rendering it inanimate. In order to touch upon its solitude I must let go of part of the face, part of the head. I must injure.

The face is a live manifestation of how the night sky simultaneously contains the luminous side and the nocturnal side of the moon. The proximity between light and darkness in the sky-like face touches upon the incomprehensible. The composition is a means of capturing that which cannot be captured. It carries within it the resistance to the sadness or pain sealed within the face.

I am drawn to the reality of the white page. The void seems to announce its existence. It is within this whiteness and in relation to it that I try to attain a "simple" state of being, as if I must lay the face back into the earth. I move between the desire to freeze it on the white page and the desire to sustain it, breathing, for a tense duration.

In contrast to the traditional icon, which is based on the resemblance between the figure and its representation, I search for the chasm between them. The portrait exists in the space between the viewer's expectation of identifying the figure, and what comes into being in the painting as an independent power.

This power is not a formal painterly force, but rather the focal point of an interpersonal space. For me, observation is a real action in the world. As such, it takes into account the "being" of the person in front of me.
The other is forever an uncontrollable subject. You cannot hold on to him. To a certain extent, you can control the chalk you use in order to "translate" the tremulous life that appears and disappears in front of you-yet you cannot capture the eye whose object you yourself have become.

I would like to relinquish control. Sometimes I manage this in the course of the work process. Drawing involves a period of idle staring. You stare idly. For me, this is the point at which I begin to see. This is not a state in which one person controls the other. It is a moment of complicity, a dialogue.

The movement-towards contains an element of surrender. Yet to what degree is the sitter willing to surrender himself? I wish he would ignore my presence, so that I am no longer an obstacle to his self-reflection. This is the moment in which I am no longer an artist; I am an object within someone else's field of vision. The sitter's proximity to himself influences my ability to approach him. When I do not sense the person's closeness to himself, I can only cling to his external attributes. The mutual attentiveness of the gaze and of its object constitutes the ethos of the portrait.

A point of view gives one "control." You are seemingly given the possibility of representing the entire system as oriented towards youeself. In this case, relinquishing control means recognizing the arbitrariness of my perspective, of the gap separating me from the subject I am painting, of my inability to reach him.

At times the process of observation is experienced as a desire for distance or as a form of enhanced closeness. It is important for me not to work from a single point of view. Nevertheless, I attempt to piece together the different perspectives, to attain a new point of view that will exceed subjectivity.

Drawing the face of a deceased poet brings the attempt to draw any face to an extreme. The faces of poets are marked by time. They are the carriers of a secret life. Their pathology is a personal, rather
than a public one. I am drawn to the recognition of finality embedded in the poet's work, and I try to transport it into the portrait. In this sense, the encounter with his face renders the affinity between the portrait and death more poignant. Like poetry, portraiture is suffused with an awareness of ephemerality-which transforms the present moment into the past, life into death. This awareness is even more poignant when I draw the portrait of a dead poet whom I never met-whom I can know only through his writing and through remaining photographs. As far as he is concerned, it is not I who has created the visual instant in which he is being observed. In a certain sense, I am only peering at this moment, peering at it from the outside. Perhaps this is what makes me endeavor to evoke the poet from a place without words.

I began drawing these portraits in the late 1980s. Today I see this project as a homage to the solitary voice, to a world that is becoming extinct. This project is still in process, and only some of the portraits are included in this book. It is important to note that it is not my intention to present a poetic "canon." Part of these works evolved out of real-life encounters, while others form milestones in a history of reading that conjures up the poet.