The “Go In Peace” series of small works, done during 1997, is a kind of small, intimate demonstration by Pinchas Zinovich to call “Go In Peace” appears in each of the works, surrounded by a bubble, like in the comics. It is the nucleus around which the works are built. Despite the fact that the series was born as a response to a particular event in the Israeli political culture (the episode of the appointment of the legal advisor to the government), the series should not be seen as a political essay, a challenge, a posttest poster or a criticism; rather, these are scribbling of personal thoughts, a picture of a human situation.
“Go In Peace”, a statement in the form of an imperative, is not expressed in a negative sense of exorcism, but as a description of an aspiration for change, as an admission that the way things are demands as a change. The expression appears not so much as a curse but as a wish, a wish for peace, the heart’s desire of every one of us.
‘Go In peace” is also the point of departure of the personal journey, and the work is an illustration of a route of wandering, a kind of personal Odyssey, which often becomes a via dolorosa. At times it is a children’s game, a “surfing” or movement through a landscape, a rambling among the tree’s branches, a strolling about “inside the head”. Some of the paths are visible, even marked: arrows serve as signs for the participant in the journey. Some of them are hidden, inside mazes, among masses and lines that are frequently menacing, enclosing lines, stumbling blocks.
In this journey the wanderer passes images that at first glance look familiar, and some can even be identifies: a magnifying-glass, a head, a bird, body organs. But the identification is misleading. The hatching blurs the meaning of the image. Indeed, the abstract images look more concrete, and hence more menacing. The expression “Go In Peace” passes through the journey like an Ariadne’s thread, leading through the maze. The way becomes blurred and at the same time clear, winding among organic images and strip of landscape, penetrating inwards, revealing itself to the eye once more, and then being hidden once behind a branch or a stain. Although the paths are marked, the viewer remains imprisoned inside the pages, a metaphor for an existential state, of quest and wandering, with no exit, but with a declared goal: peace.
In many of the works the emphasis is not on the center of the page, the focus of the power, as against the peripheries that remain bare. The manner of the work, the laying of the water colors directly on the paper, with no preliminary sketching, resembles the process of the painting in oil. The watercolors become more material, and the brushstrokes more spontaneous. The coloring looks broken, not pure, “dirty”, very similar to the color scale of the artist’s oil painting, but a contrast to the airy atmosphere of watercolors.
The rich coloring and the texture of the colors create a mixed sense of mystery and magic beside menace and enclosure. The compulsive work creates an imaginary energy field around the verbal expression, and as-it-were threatens to invade the protected special space of the statement. In most of the works the brushstrokes creates rhythm, a movement, which is accompanied by a sense of almost –eruption. The works are charged with a stormy spirit that is halted, blocked, stopped; the artist attempts to expose and suppress the storm, and the outcome is a compulsive occurrence in the face of a dread of the empty space.
The translation from page to page (the artist has numbered the pages) determines the sequence of the journey, in which the expression “Go In Peace” is the guiding thread. But we remain imprisoned inside the page, inside the series, wandering without any solution. A contemporary Odyssey.
Sorin Heller
